Herbie Mann

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

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

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

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

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

This be an empty world without the blues.

At times as a performer they segregated us in some of theatres.

A guy is influenced by hundreds of people and things, and all show up in his work. To fasten on any one or two is ridiculous. I will say one thing, though. Lennie Tristano’s early records impressed me tremendously. Tunes like ‘Tautology,’ ‘Marshmallow,’ and ‘Fishin’ Around.’ I heard the fellows in his group building their lines with a design and general structure that was different from anything I’d ever heard in jazz.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

The fabulous places I’ve been, wonderful things that’ve happened, great people I’ve met ought to make a story.

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

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.

People don’t want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately and this is one of the biggest problems.

If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterward.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.