Mike Stern

I want people to walk away with the same joy, hope and love that I put into my music.

The deeper you get into the music allows the ability to appreciate art and all other forms of expression.

Sometimes there are no gigs, but the main thing is still the music.

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.

A musician starting out today should get a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument.

Women have not been socialized to play drums. It’s not natural for us to hit thing.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

There’s only one thing that everyone in this world has in common: whether you want to love somebody and you want to be loved in return.

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

The more you play, the more you hear and the more you hear, the more you want to play.

Do it again on the next verse and people think you meant it.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

Music’s been around a long time, and there’s going to be music long after Ray Charles is dead. I just want to make my mark, leave something musically good behind. If it’s a big record, that’s the frosting on the cake, but music’s the main meal.