Jon Batiste Quotes

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.

Anything that broadens your musicality always moves the way you write drum or guitar parts.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

You never know what you're going to end up with when you sit down to write something. At the end, if it holds, it can do this multifarious thing - which is to open things rather than close them, to make them bigger rather than smaller, to cross those divides which we live every day of our lives.

There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

I feel I need a lot of contrast, so I have all these things happening, but they're all necessary to make me feel satisfied. It's got to be this big pot happening, with everything boiling at once.

If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.

We inhabit a universe that is characterized by diversity.

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.

New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.

Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.

It's like that Simpsons joke - they're filming a cow in a movie and they go, 'OK, we'll tape a bunch of cats together to make a cow', and it's like, 'Why don't you just use a cow?'. For some reason that is novel - like, 'Oh, my guitar sounds like a piano and now if I can just get my piano to sound like my guitar'.

Jazz music is the American's music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy.

The true key of the universe is love.

When we talk about music, we talk about our reaction to it. One person might say that music is so poetic, while another says it's all mathematics. Yet another might say it's about sensuality, and so on. That's all true. But music is not just one of these things. It's everything all at once.

It wasn't until my fifth or sixth book where I realized I'm trying to do the same thing in every story I tell, which is bring everybody together in the same room.

Everything in the world is conducted by gradual process. This seems to be the great principle of harmony in the universe.

Music is as vast as the sky, the oceans, the universe.

In western classical music with an orchestra, you focus the orchestra on melodies and harmony. In African music, the biggest focus is on rhythms and counter-rhythms - the complexity of rhythms.

Music is so unpredictable, but it's universal.