Diane Schuurs

I try to keep my ego at the right size. No matter what, I just do my best to live in an attitude of gratitude.

I’ve already done so much. The rest is just gravy, it’s like frosting on the cake

My career has been a combination of hard work and timing. Working with Stevie Wonder at the Kennedy Center Honors was timing. The Tonight Show was timing. Carnegie Hall, that was timing. My marriage was timing. I was ready, I wanted to know what it was like.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

I try to just be grateful for what I have, and not [focus on] the things that I don’t have.

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.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

Composing is a mindset, a part of who I am.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

I only knew classical music, which to me was the only true music. The only way I could survive at the bar was to mix the classical music with popular songs, and that meant I had to sing. What happened was that I discovered I had a voice plus the talent to mix classical music together with more popular songs, which at the time I detested.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.

Keeping your artistic self as creative as possible is a balancing act.

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.

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

I think the one thing that I’ve learned is that you cannot predict what’s going to happen. You can’t sit back and try to figure out what people want or leave it up to them to decide. When we all started in this business we would dictate to the audience what was great and they picked up on that based on the fact that we believed that it was great. But that’s all changed. What’s happened in the last ten years or so because is that the technology now means that everyone with a computer can make music and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Jazz singing is like pornography. You can’t say what it is, but you know it when you see it.

What are you going to do when you love music? You can’t stop.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

I sought some kind of freedom in music, in the promise of transcendence and the idea that the purity and the innocence of a mythical god could somehow deliver me from darkness.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.

A Jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.