Roberta Gambarini

We change every minute, never the same. If there’s no room to express the changes there can’t be any truthfulness.

Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I’m concerned with retaining that process.

When Hank Jones had his night off, I would get somebody to take my place as intermission pianist and I’d play the show with Ella, so I would get a chance to play with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as well.

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.

The idea is more important than the style you’re playing in.

I saw music as a way to entertain people and take them away from their daily lives and put smiles on their faces, as opposed to what I see it being now, which is a way for me to actually communicate, and a way for me to tap into my subconscious.

A drummer has to be kind-hearted.

To me, singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

Jazz is a complete lifestyle, something that you feel, something that you live.

I’m trying to get people to see that we are our brother’s keeper. Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.

The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.

[on Ornette Coleman] Man, that cat is nuts!

Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.

People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.