Tom Harrell

Sounds of daily life are musical. I try to absorb the intricacies of sounds as if I were listening to music.

Whenever there’s a change with Jazz and its aesthetics, it’s almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

A Jazz musician is supposed to find his voice, find his niche and do his thing.

The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen.

I’ll always write music. Whether I release a record, whether I let the public hear it or not, I’m always writing music.

Ideologies separate us. Art brings us together.

Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

There’s always room for improvisation or changes of expression.

I never really thought about becoming a professional musician.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

The first time I ever had to go overseas for music was to play the Royal Festival Hall in London, singing in a tribute to Ella Fitzgerald, and that week was insane: Thursday I rehearse with the orchestra; Friday I sing two songs in front of 2,500 people, which I have never done before; and the next day I go to Abbey Road to record with Herbie Hancock; and then I am playing a pub in south London somewhere, and nobody cares because London have lost some sporting match; and then I go home and I’m standing in front of my washing machine, putting my unmentionables into the dryer, and in that instant, I just looked at myself and said ‘This life is going to be strange’.

You only go around once and this ain’t no rehearsal.

Music is a reservoir… of sounds.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.