Mary Kingsley

Once you have been bitten by the Jazz bug, it is not a choice anymore.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

You have to understand the styles and it’s good to study those that came before us.

I really liked Wynton when I first met him. He’s still a nice young man, only confused.

The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.

Music should always be an adventure.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.

I’m glad I don’t have perfect pitch because it can drive you crazy.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.