Art Blakey

If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet.

A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.

We’re here to have a ball.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

[On the word Jazz] There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s only a word. What’s in a name? Nothing! Cats say, Call me Muhammed so-and-so. But what’s the difference? A name doesn’t make the music. It’s just called that to differentiate it from other types of music. Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts.

I’ll be writing songs till I die. There’s just no question.

How can I turn emotion into knowledge? That’s what I try to do with my horn.

If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

I could see that Bukka was born to be a bluesman, and I wondered if the same was true of me. I worried that I didn’t have his talent – or the talent of someone like Blind Lemon or T-Bone. I felt something beautiful inside Bukka’s soul. Even if I didn’t follow his style, I was moved by his sincerity. He loved telling stories, and used his blues to tell them. His blues was the book of his life. He sang about his rough times and fast time and loving times and angry times. He’d entertain at a party for two hundred people with the same enthusiasm as a party for twenty. Bukka gave it his all. His music had a consistency I admired. Like all the great bluesmen, he said, I am what I am. I wondered if I could be that steady and strong.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Jazz musician is a combination entertainer, poet, singer, educator, student, artist, seducer and all-round good fellow.

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that’s all it is about is opinions.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition.

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.