Don’t bullshit, just play.
Jazz music is the power of now.
Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.
Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.
In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
A beat is a moment in the life a groove.
Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.
I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.
I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.
The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.
If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones.
Music used to be essential and meaningful, but now it’s disposable.
Jazz is a music that allows a person to express his deepest, most personal self.
If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!
Everyone is working who should be.
Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.
I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.
I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.
Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.
Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what theyre trying to say with jazz. You dont need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.
Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.
[On urging Nyro to tell Barbara Streisand that ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ had been personally written for her] It’s not a big lie.
