Herbie Hancock

The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

When I was coming up, I practiced all the time because I thought if I didn’t I couldn’t do my best.

Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.

I try to practice with my life.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!

If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.

Miles Davis and John Coltrane were so cool, if alive today global warming wouldn’t be an issue.

I am attracted to Jazz music for the idea of being in the moment and communicating to people spontaneously.

As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings. They seem to bring out the feelings of the artist and they brought out my feelings as a kid. They made me wanna move, or sing, or pick up Reverend’s guitar and figure out how to make those wonderful sounds.

I don’t have a definition of Jazz. You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.

I’m very shy, and I shy away from people. But the moment I hit the stage, it’s a different feeling I get nerve from somewhere; maybe it’s because it’s something I love to do.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

Too many young musicians today want to win polls before they learn their instruments.

The blues comes right back to a person’s feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don’t know nothing about the blues, please believe me.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

Jazz improvisation is the art of drawing without an eraser.

In this era it’s harder for musicians to get together, … Back in the ’80s, we were all at the clubs, you ran into people all the time. Now, everybody’s kind of in their own room with their computers. I use making an album as an opportunity to connect with musicians.