Art Blakey

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

We’re here to have a ball.

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.

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.

Playing gives me as much good feeling now as it did when I was a bitty kid.

I don’t have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapy is in art.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

I wasn’t interested in practicing Bach; I was too busy digging Horace Silver!

I’d solo on my guitar; then sing; then solo; then sing some more. one stopped when the other started. That way I felt a continuity, not a conflict, like a wheel that keeps turning. Both sounds – guitar and voice – were coming out of me, but they issued from different parts of my soul.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it’s like the human voice

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

I’m gonna live till I die.

I think pop music is one of the few things in the 20th century that have made giant strides in reverse.

Miles’ sessions were not typical of anybody else’s sessions. They were totally unique.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

Judy Garland was the singer I most wanted to sound like then, not to copy, but to get some of her soul and purity. A wonderful young voice.

As long as you’ve got your horn in your mouth, you’re developing.

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression.