Mark Murphy

I didn’t get my music together until I was 40.

My singing evolved with a feeling of intense relaxation, always using my diaphram and breathing specifically through my nose.

It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play.

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

Breathe…. breathe a lot!

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

When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.

I started to like blues, I guess, when I was about 6 or 7 years old. There was something about it, because nobody else played that kind of music.

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

Albert King wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues!

Once you become predictable, no one’s interested anymore.

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 can play all I know in eight bars.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

Forgive me if I don’t have the words. Maybe I can sing it and you’ll understand.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.