Ray Brown Quotes

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

I like to improvise.

For me, music and life are all about style.

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

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.

If you listen to the way I speak, I have a lot of rhythm, use a lot of accents. When I'm playing my instrument, that concept comes through very clearly.

I think the word soul has gotta come into it. Music that's created just for consuming lacks that soul, that swing, that feeling.

Dancing, apart to music with a beat, is my legacy.

Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.

He comes in on the beat and plays on top of the beat. I think when Prince makes love, he hears drums instead of Ravel.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

I always enjoy rhythms and melodies, but I always use my voice as more of an instrument and less of a soapbox for me to say or to preach.

I've come to realize that you live on through recordings; they're like a musical diary, a window into somebody's soul.

When it's time to make music, that's about getting lost for me. To be a control freak is not half as good as being a freak who's casually in control. You're feeling around in the dark for something that feels good.

I've always liked to dance - I've got a natural rhythm.

Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you.

I just love entertaining. I will do anything - stand-up comedy, video games, fencing, internet shorts - I just want to keep being lucky enough to entertain people anyway I can. I try never to limit my art to a medium.

Blues is my life. It's a true feeling that comes from the heart, not something that just comes out of my mouth. Blues is what I love, and blues is what I always do.

I love music and I love to dance.

Dance is so joyous.

The theater, for me, has always been a place where I'm free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.

I get burned out on standup. But I like acting. I do like it. But sometimes you just feel like a monkey. You just feel like a complete tool. But I like it. I do like it. Stand-up is just more free. A lot more freedom because you just do what you want to do.

I'll sing as long as I can because I enjoy doing that. I enjoy the fans and what I do. I love the traveling and the hotels and just seeing the world over and over again.

I love being in the studio. Expressing myself that way is really cool.