Herbie Hancock

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

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

You can practice to learn technique, but I’m more interested in conceiving something in the moment.

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

I think there’s a great beauty to having problems. That’s one of the ways we learn.

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

I’m always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

I don’t care much about music. What I like is sounds.

We’re here to have a ball.

What’s tied Jazz together is its foundation in the Blues, a reliance on group interplay and the unique phenomenon of spontaneous improvisation.

I can count on one hand the number of instrumental hits there have been over the last 10 years.

I don’t really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I’d like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.

You have a mentor or teacher and you learn all he can show you.

I’m not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don’t last.

I’ve never thought the blues was a matter of copying other people. The blues singer should sing songs about his own life. And once the ball got rolling, I felt confident enough to do that as well as cover other people’s songs, and the tributes. You’ve got to think about representing your own life in the music, and for me that meant bringing in an element of jazz; I was brought up on jazz, it was my father’s work, it was in the house.

To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.

When you sing, always tell the truth.

People complain about the music industry, but this is a great time to be a musician.

All that I’ve played, all that I’ve sung, I couldn’t have done any other way.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.