Patricia Barber

You know at an early age if you have a talent for music.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music.

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

Jazz music is our original American culture.

Give it a good go, try to have fun at it, try to pass on some good notes and some good sounds to your fans, and I don’t think you will have wasted your time.

If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.

Its all about finding the right note at the right place and knowing when to leave it alone.

I could write six songs in one day with everything that’s going on.

Jazz is one of the few things you can do in society to express yourself freely and creatively.

I am an American citizen and feel I am entitled to the same rights as any other citizen.

I’ve never thought the blues was a matter of copying other people. The blues singer should sing songs about his own life. And once the ball got rolling, I felt confident enough to do that as well as cover other people’s songs, and the tributes. You’ve got to think about representing your own life in the music, and for me that meant bringing in an element of jazz; I was brought up on jazz, it was my father’s work, it was in the house.

I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.