Lou Rawls

Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

Jazzmen are our surrogates for the unpredictable, our paladins of constant change.

I listen to all kinds of songs. There’s something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it’s pop or jazz or hip-hop.

Jazz music is the power of now.

The way I look at it, they’re all part of my musical diary, and I can listen to any one of them and it will bring up memories of what was going on at that time.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.

I guess what everyone wants more than anything else is to be loved. And to know that you loved me for my singing is too much for me. Forgive me if I don’t have all the words. Maybe I can sing it and you’ll understand.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

I’ve sung a lot of emotional songs, but when you’re writing it’s very difficult to decide what to reveal.

When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

The point of Jazz is, you do something and then you go on.