Duke Ellington

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

To keep a band together you simply need a gimmick. The gimmick I use is to pay them money.

It’s all music.

Roaming through the jungle of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’, searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.

A goal is a dream with a finish line.

Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.

It’s all music.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

There’s a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.

Learning to read music in Braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory.

I am attracted to Jazz music for the idea of being in the moment and communicating to people spontaneously.

Let my children have music.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

The spirit of Jazz is the spirit of openness.

Dance music-as I keep saying, you can dance to a windshield wiper… a windshield wiper that’s fairly steady gives you a beat and all you need is an out-of-tune playing ‘Melancholy Baby’ and you’ve got dance music.

The only thing better than singing is more singing.