Madeleine Peyroux

Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.

I thank you in advance for the great round of applause I’m about to get.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn’t live with it–even of my own music–with the same nuances forever.

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

Talent is cheap, and many talents treat themselves cheaply.

I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.

If I could read it, I could play it.

My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me. It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

I think the idea of a love song has changed. Most of the love songs we all loved as kids would be classified as funeral dirges now, you know, really super slow. I think nowadays the ballad has changed. It can have some up-tempo, some drums, some other things. ‘Forever’ would still be considered a ballad, I guess, but the tempo is probably more of a mid-tempo. The content is love song. I don’t know how to write anything else.

I guess you can look at me, and tell I’m the old man. My name is BB King.

When I got started in New York, if you were different from Miles and Dizzy it was very difficult.