Patricia Barber

Music chooses her musicians.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

Typically I go in the studio and whatever I’m contemplating that day will wind up being a song. I don’t come in with lyrics… I just go in and let it happen.

Keep on listening and tapping your feet.

Jazz music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you absorb it.

I’ve always had a deep love of live performance, it’s when I feel most alive.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

People always ask, “Why jazz?” and I’m like “Why not?” It’s kind of like asking Seurat, “Why so many dots?” I imagine if you asked Bjork, “Why the Tibetan bells?” She’d probably be like “That’s just what I heard.” It’s the same thing. This is just the way I see music.

[on Prince] I learned about music that didn’t have any barriers or any kind of, like, containment. I learned about wild, crazy topics and ways to express yourself that had never been written in quite that way before. I learned that a human being could be able to defy all stereotypes, and be the epitome of badassness.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

You explore beautiful songs and create your own interpretation of them.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.