Harold Land

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

You give up your own personality when you imitate somebody.

There’s two things you can’t live without. Water and music.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

There are times when you want to go where you used to go and you can’t go there. So I’m back to Count Basie lifting his hand. And I find you can stop that show with one note just like you can with a hundred.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

I’ve always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn’t have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.

Jazz has the ability to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.