Isaac Hayes

Have you ever wondered why young people take to music like fish to water? Maybe it’s because music is fun, plain and simple.

I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not, it’s feeling.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.

I do Jazz, Blues, Country and so forth. I do them all like a good utility man.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often -in fact, mostly -at the expense of everything else in my life.

Oh, my darling, it’s incredible, that someone so unforgettable should think I am unforgettable, too.

I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.