Herbie Hancock Quotes

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I listen to old jazz and classical music, and that's it.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

I think I was supposed to play jazz.

I was exposed to jazz early on.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

My favorite music is jazz, actually. It's what I listen to, it's what I was raised on, and it's what I prefer to sing.

I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.

When I started music, I started out in Puerto Rico with classical music. But what really made me want to be a musician was jazz, and because I didn't grow up with jazz, I had to learn it from a very basic level. I had to go into the history and learn everything about the development of the music, all the players and all that stuff.

Yeah, I grew up playing lots of jazz music in school.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

I'm really a singer, so I love songs and I love singing. I like rap music, but I didn't grow up freestyling.

And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.

I've been into music for a long time. I started playing drums when I was 8 and piano when I was 10, then bass and guitar when I was 18.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.