Terri Lyne Carrington

Once you have been bitten by the Jazz bug, it is not a choice anymore.

Jazz means many things to many people, but it’s all about choices.

Women have not been socialized to play drums. It’s not natural for us to hit thing.

Women bring something different to an instrument if they are respectful of their feminine aesthetic.

People who are meant to be drawn to your music will find you.

I have younger friends who don’t work and they aren’t doing so well. My secret is to keep going, keep working.

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.

I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy and Bird.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

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.

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

You can’t rehearse a blues darlin’.

Everybody has somebody that they patterned themselves after.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.