What we play is life.
Not too slow, not too fast. Kind of half-fast.
Making money aint nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die youre just as graveyard dead as he is.
Never play anything the same way twice.
Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?
Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.
We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.
Jazz has the ability to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles.
Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.
I was not prepared to play the role of singer in the camp of the warriors
Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking.
Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.
I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.
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.
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.
If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.
I don’t really live like a musician myself. I think music is just something that I do, but I’d like to be doing lots of other things. I like to cure all kinds of illness.
Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.
Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.
The beauty of Jazz is that it’s malleable. People address it to suit their own personalities.
The whole concept for the Yeezus album is that we’re not going to be using CDs in the future and since this is the last time we’re going to see it, this is an open casket for the CD.
Jazz music is the real deal.
