Yusef Lateef Quotes

At 3 A.M., I'm still up watching videos of jazz heroes I never saw live. It's so thrilling. And not just the music. The Internet is changing the future of fund-raising. I'm thrilled by the potential.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

Jazz was a bomb. That was also the low point of Mac sales. People had just written it off.

My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.

I see technology as being an extension of the human body.

Everybody gets excited about technology, but it doesn't interest me in the least. I'm only interested in it if it makes my job easier or cheaper. They're tools.

The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.

I am now obsessed with the technology of the body. I think it's the most technologically literate thing that we have.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians.

You have to be very prudent with what you are doing and what sort of tools you are utilizing. Drones have become a wonderful new tool in filmmaking.

If you are dealing with life from a low-level sensibility, the Internet can be a tool for manifesting that. But if you're dealing with life from the highest sensibility, it can also be your tool for manifesting that. The simple reason is that it doesn't cost money.

Look, man, all I am is a trumpet player.

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can't close your ears. The reason you can't close your ears is, if a lion was coming, you had to wake up. Today no lions are coming. Beeping trucks are coming. I read the other day that the guy who invented the beep when trucks go backward, he died. I thought: Of course - he dies, I have to listen to it.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

I expect the audience to come up to my level.

All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body. Its parts are far more delicate, and their mutual adjustments infinitely more accurate, than are those of the most perfect chronometer ever made.

Jazz is so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.