Luciana Souza

Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul.

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

Music should never be harmless.

Everything that happened to me as a child involved music. It was part of everyday life, as automatic as breathing.

For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hr and they always tipped me at the end of the night.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.

Practice 15 or 20 years and then it comes out spontaneously.

I think you can play anything you wanna as long as you take the audience along with you.

There is two kinds of music, the good and the bad. I play the good kind.

The truth is I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

I loved the feeling that I got singing.

I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.