Robert Glasper

Jazz music is an aural souvenir of mankind’s attempt to express the intangible, the heart, the soul, through art.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

I hear beauty and elegance combined with passion and fire.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

You can separate the men from the boys and ballads.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

I’ve always wanted a C trumpet on top, to have that same kind of facility without shouting.

Check out the albums, … Check out the live performances. That’s the reality of it all. Music is such an energizing thing.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

Nothing is so well-prepared as a great spontaneous performance.