Horace Silver

We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.

Jazz music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you absorb it.

All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel… and that’s what I’ve been doing all my life.

I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.

We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.

Les Paul was one of the great innovators of the early electric guitar, and he made some fantastic guitar records. To me, Les Paul is very much it.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there’s a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

You’ve got to learn your instrument.

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

They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

I’m not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I’d rather be figured out.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.

I’m not like a legend that – so I’m sort of in the middle in this sort of gray area where, you know, I’m creating music, and I’m not saying there isn’t an audience, because there is; because all of those people go out and spend $80 to $150 on a concert ticket.