Herbie Hancock

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.

Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference.

Jazz? has no boundaries.

But I have to be careful not to let the world dazzle me so much that I forget that I’m a husband and a father.

The true artform is being a human being.

I still love the whole history of Jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

Play for the spiritual aspect, the emotion.

Musicians have a really big part to play in spreading messages because they’re able to reach a large portion of people on an emotional level. Artists reach people at their heart; it’s the only time we meet in one place and put our differences aside. When you’re in a forum listening to music, all you feel in that moment is love and the understanding.

Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

My improvisations are a beguiling mixture of the vertical and the horizontal.

I’m not like a legend that – so I’m sort of in the middle in this sort of gray area where, you know, I’m creating music, and I’m not saying there isn’t an audience, because there is; because all of those people go out and spend $80 to $150 on a concert ticket.

Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.

From hard rhythms of Be-bop, the mellow harmonies of Cool, to atonal forays of Free and the Straight Ahead delivery of Modern, it’s all Jazz.

I gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

You blows who you is.