Herbie Mann

Music allows the great opportunity to play with people you love.

If you keep your head in the sand, you don’t know where the kick’s coming from.

If you want to play somebody’s music, you’d better go into his house.

I asked my mother could I have an instrument. She said, ‘Well if you go out and save your money.’ So I went and got – I made me a shine box. I went out and started shining shoes, and I’d bring whatever I made.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

Music is interior decoration.

Stop before you’re done.

It became a kind of a game, to remember the things that had happened five minutes ago. I would start making notes about the things I was doing, on an instrument that was foreign to me, the guitar, so it was just a fun way of doing cognitive therapy. I was none the wiser to it until I began to improve and my ability to speak began to come back.

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

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

When you listen to a pianist, each notes should have an identity, each note should have a soul of its own.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

I’ve always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn’t have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

At times in my life the only place I have been happy is when I am on stage.

I have won several prizes as the world’s slowest alto player and a special award in 1961 for quietness.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

A musician’s responsibility is to get as much of his art across to the public as possible.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.