Herbie Hancock

Miles’ sessions were not typical of anybody else’s sessions. They were totally unique.

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

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

Creativity shouldn’t be following radio; it should be the other way around.

The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

I’ve always liked the Freddie King/B. B. King rich tone, and at the same time, I like the manic Buddy Guy/Otis Rush Strat tone. So I’m always caught in the middle of the Gibson and Fender sounds. If I’m playing my black [Fender] Strat, and I’m in the middle of a blues, I kind of wish I was playing a [Gibson] Les Paul. Then again, if I was playing a Les Paul, the sound would be great, but I’d be saying, “Man, I wish I had the Stratocaster neck!”

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.

Composing makes me feel like I’ve finally gotten all the way up the ladder as a musician.

I’m more careful about my hands than about what I eat and most anything else, because my hands have been my living. My hands have been able to help me learn. My hands have taken me around the world. So I’m very proud of my hands.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I ‘d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

Critics don’t buy records. They get ’em free.

People involve themselves with the superficiality of Jazz without digging for its soul.

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.

Music is what I hear and something that I live by.

When the label came to me to say, ‘would you like to do another record,’ I said, ‘Well I got these sixteen songs sitting here, so let’s do it.’ And that was pretty much it… I never stopped writing, it’s just the way that the business is now; you just try to find a different model.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn’t have a choice.

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.