Max Roach

Jazz music grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath.

In classical music, only two people are important, the composer and the conductor. Everybody else is a serf. In jazz, a thing of beauty is created collectively with everybody getting to express an idea. And that reflects what democratic society is – or should be.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

The people who really got me off were dealing with the musical potential of their instrument.

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.

You just sort of have to play the way you are.

I use the audience as my color palette, my instrument.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

Jazz music is a special skill that has brought pleasure to millions throughout the world.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

Music should never be harmless.

Play it f**kin’ loud!

If you can’t get your songs to people one way, you have to find another.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?

In my opinion, I think sarcasm and humor in a song, without turning it into a novelty song, is really charming.

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.

Jazz – it takes passion to make it happen!