Herbie Mann

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.

You don’t have to live the blues to play the blues.

The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody’s interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking… The new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.

Talent is cheap, and many talents treat themselves cheaply.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Musicians need to continue higher learning try to expand the pallet.

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

I discovered very early that it wasn’t quite enough for me to imitate people.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

People will hire you and then tell you not to do what you were doing when they heard you.