Enos Payne

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.

Jazz – it takes passion to make it happen!

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really.

There is no such thing as a wrong note.

I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Silence is what makes music sexy. I just move blocks of silence around. The notes are an afterthought.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

Your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’ So hush little baby don’t you cry.

I have always seen Jazz as innovative.

In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody’s interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.