Jerome Richardson Quotes

Saxophone is one thing, and music is another.

When you play a sax, that saxophone is irreverent. It's noisy; it's a trickster... you cannot hide the saxophone in your hands, so it's a good teacher.

I would love to learn to play something so I don't have to rely on someone to collaborate with.

All I can say is if the part doesn't delight me in some way, or I can't feel any compassion for it, I just can't do it.

Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room and come out with a piece of music.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

To me, playing an instrument and singing, all of these different things are just as natural to me as rhyming.

There were no rules, other than that the song should sound good and be fun to play.

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.

I look at my clarinet sometimes and I think, I wonder what's going to come out of there tonight? You never know.

I didn't aim at anything except good music.

The saxophone is a very interesting machine, but I'm more interested in music.

When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.

I like both music and acting, and they both have a lot in common - timing, immediacy, stuff like that. But acting is more regimented. You wait around for hours, you don't get to write the script, you get hired. Music represents me better. I'm not acting; I'm just expressing myself.

I just do what I'm here for and that's to make that music.

I really want to write a novel. I also want to learn to play the mandolin.

I love playing. The keyboard is my journal.

It's always a live experience - anything that happens around you. It's so easy to just put it to a song.

I love making music. I love that it's unstructured, that I get to go perform and play in front of people, to meet new people. I love to do the thing I'm best at every day.

Creating a dance is like coming up with a Chuck Berry riff.

Jazz is pretty much the freest thing you can be a part of. It's the closest thing I can get to flying. It's fun, interactive. In its own way, it's a sport.

We do try to be entertainers, but we're musicians first, and we try to showcase the music.

Jazz is a hard music, and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that's the most important thing.

It keeps my feet on the ground just making sure that I'm always trying to learn something new or trying to be a real guitar player.

Erroll Garner is one of the few musicians I believe has a sense of humor in his music.