Terri Lyne Carrington

Our music artistry should not be disconnected from our lives or ourselves.

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

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

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

If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

I like jazz, rock n’ roll, some hip hop – I can’t think of any music I don’t like.

Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.

Talent is cheap, and many talents treat themselves cheaply.

Playing the guitar is like telling the truth – you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don’t have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don’t have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It’s you.

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

I don’t believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.

When the music changes, so does the dance.

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

If you’re going to make a mistake, make it loud so everybody else sounds wrong.

Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief.

After the music is over it’s gone in the air. You can never capture it again.

We’re more popular than Jesus Christ now. I don’t know which will go first; rock and roll or Christianity.