Kanye West

I am a black American male from Chicago, who had my rehearsal dinner at Versailles and then got married in Florence with a view of the entire city.

I forgot better shit than you ever thought of.

Didn’t want y’all to call me fat, so I got liposuction. And they gave me opioids.

Maybe I shouldn’t have these dreams and aspirations. Maybe I should have given up on life ten years ago and stopped fighting for my truth.

We’re numb. We’re numb to 500 kids getting killed in Chicago last year. We’re numb that there were dozens of police shootings in the beginning of July. We’re numb to places on the earth where we don’t live. Our life is OK, but it’s OK for other people’s lives to not be OK.

I think an extreme thing; I adjust it, I adjust it, I adjust it. That’s the way I get to it, but I have to push to, you know, the furthest concept possible.

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

I don’t really get nervous, I prepare. When the music messed up in the beginning, it tapped into my nerves and when you’re nervous and vulnerable, something special and something different can happen.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.

Joe’s been my drummer for 14 years, and we’ve been buddies for six years.

I met up with George Shearing about a year before my mother passed away. When I was 11 years old, Mama took me to the Edgewater Inn in Seattle and I was able to sit down and play piano for George and a lot of (the set list) was songs I had heard from the album, ‘Concerto For My Love.’ Then, after Mama died, my dad and I went to actually hear him perform at the Edgewater Inn when I was 12. Oh my gosh! It just really got me into playing piano.

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

I am at my core a singer/songwriter a la James Taylor or a la Billy Joel. It’s not that I don’t want to work with people, but I do just love doing my own thing.

I find my inspiration in myself.

Jazz has such great feeling and emotional content it really doesn’t require technical understanding.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

All that I’ve played, all that I’ve sung, I couldn’t have done any other way.

As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age.