Tom Harrell

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

Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that it’s almost as if it’s intertwined with society.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.

For a long time I wasn’t listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty–it would bring back memories I didn’t want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I’m not alive ’cause I’m not making it. And if it was good, I hated it ’cause I wasn’t doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious ’cause I could’ve done it better…

If a guy’s got it, let him give it. I’m selling music, not prejudice.

It’s not that you want to sing, it’s that you have to sing.

You’ve heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better’n I can, play the blues better’n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.

I think when my brother (Claude who founded vocal sextet Take Six) got his deal and I saw him on the Grammys that was when I said, ‘oh, you know what? If he can do it then maybe I can do too’ and that’s when I really focused on trying to make it in this business.

The more you play, the more you hear and the more you hear, the more you want to play.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It’s not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.

I listen to all kinds of songs. There’s something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it’s pop or jazz or hip-hop.

I thought of nothing else but rock ‘n’ roll; apart from sex and food and money–but that’s all the same thing, really.

Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.