Michelle Obama

I view myself as being the average woman.

We’re so afraid of each other… Colour, wealth, these things that don’t really matter still play too much of a role in how we see one another. And it’s sad, because the thing that least defines us is the colour of our skin.

When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.

If we don’t teach our young girls to speak at an early age, that doesn’t just happen.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

I’ve never had the passion for politics.

And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

There’s two things you can’t live without. Water and music.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

The violin, the saxophone, the trumpet: Each makes a very different sound but the very same notes. That’s pretty heavy, you know ? Imagine how many different races make up the human race. I’m called colored, you’re called white, he’s called something else. We still got an asshole and a mouth. Pardon me.

Players are coming from other backgrounds: rock, folk, ethnic music. It’s changing Jazz for the better.

You can’t go to the store and buy a good ear and rhythm.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

I am at my core a singer/songwriter a la James Taylor or a la Billy Joel. It’s not that I don’t want to work with people, but I do just love doing my own thing.

Django Reinhardt was fantastic. he must have been playing all the time to be that good.

Something just grabs you about a song.

In this trumpet I hear our icons and the sound of the future.

Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them…

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.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.