Slash

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.

We all do ‘do, re, mi’ but you got to find the other notes yourself.

Jazz music is the power of now.

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

The arranger doesn’t get any royalties, but I had so much fun doing it.

I can’t understand these guys who just have to have your autograph. I asked one of them ‘What do you do when you get home, take it out and look at it?’

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room – proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

You want the audience to feel what you’re doing.

Hipness is what it is. But sometimes hipness is what it ain’t.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.