Excellence isn’t an act, it’s a habit.
We stole a box of honey jars one time and went out in the woods and took care of the whole box. I don’t think I touched honey again for 20 years. I never wanted to see honey again.
I was the most subtle person in the world.
I guess hip-hop has been closer to the pulse of the streets than any music we’ve had in a long time. It’s sociology as well as music, which is in keeping with the tradition of black music in America.
Billy Strayhorn wrote Multicolored Blue. Billy to me is the boss of the arrangers.
Young people should travel, and they don’t. You can’t know if you don’t go.
All guys get into music because they love music and they also want to get the girls.
I started imagining this whole different world. It was a society of musicians, a family I hoped I could belong to one day.
We were in the heart of the ghetto in Chicago during the Depression, and every block – it was probably the biggest black ghetto in America – every block also is the spawning ground practically for every gangster, black and white, in America too.
Every day, my daddy told me the same thing. ‘Once a task is just begun, never leave it till it’s done. Be the labour great or small, do it well or not at all.’
I’m just a musician and a record producer.
It’s easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.
If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You’re dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.
I was raised in Chicago and I guess that was one of the special breeding grounds for gangsters of all colors. That was the Detroit of the gangster world. The car industry was thugs.
The climate in the ’50s and ’60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.
I’ve met every freak in the business.
We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.
I’m never in my life going to do a record that’s a tribute to myself. I don’t need it.
I don’t deserve a Songwriters Hall of Fame Award. But fifteen years ago, I had a brain operation and I didn’t deserve that, either. So I’ll keep it.
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.