Herbie Hancock

I try stuff. I synthesize what’s of value with some of the other things I have at my disposal.

I try to practice with my life.

It’s not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.

It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

It’s up to the individual to keep up with the times.

Anytime you strike the drums, you have to be aware that you’re creating a musical event.

They always want to sell me as a hard bopper.

I don’t care for the music when they’re talking bad about women because I think women are God’s greatest gift to the planet – I just like music.

I think that it is important to try to sound like someone, especially early in your development.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

There are notes between notes, you know.