Top 35 Al Jarreau Quotes

I’ve thought about doing it as soon as it is possible with this new CD getting some wings and getting out there. I don’t know how soon that will be.

I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that.

I have been with the record company and Tommy was there doing records with other people.

I work ’cause I have to pay the bills. But I also work ’cause I love it. I don’t know what I’d do with me if I didn’t have this work. It’s what I’ve done all my life. It’s my motivation. It’s my satisfaction. It’s my joy to stand in front of an audience to sing, to come back home and write songs. Man, it’s amazing for me.

I have this image in my head of me in the house I grew up in, and hearing this incredible music on the television show, going over to it, and there’s Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert, and Annie Ross. It knocked me out of my socks, and I’m still in flight.

It is a very serious consideration for a lyricist to step in there and suggest the meaning to a song. The music is speaking for itself.

I was singing doo-wop on the corner under the streetlight with four other guys when it wasn’t called doo-wop. We just got together and sang, so that music is inside of me. It’s a lot of stuff that has been rolling around in here and becoming this compost and has made me who I am as a singer.

I say what’s on my mind and have a good time. I try to give people a show. It’s all about giving people a good time once you get out under those lights.

That’s the way I try to live. I think it’s the only way for human beings at this point in our evolution as souls, where everyone in their lifetime is going through stuff.

These songs are old friends I have entertained myself with when I’m washing the dishes, driving to the store and walking down the aisles. The ones that you sing when you’re driving in the car and as a singer you always go back to them.

I’ve got an odometer on my voice that has out-odometered an odometer on an automobile.

I’ve been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

Every good gospel singer you can hear is a scat singer; they’re just using different syllables. There are a lot of jazz singers out there, and more coming out of the churches.

I’m saved every day by the intrinsic value of the work I do, which I truly enjoy.

I don’t know where we got the notion that God wants us to suffer. Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago.

I am a distance runner, a marathoner… literally and figuratively.

Obviously given good health, and a continuing audience and a record company that allows me to do music. So given those things yes, I’m introducing some new music that people haven’t really heard me do in quite this fashion.

Al and Tommy and I sharing the biggest laugh because it was predicted by everything we did in the first three or four records in my career. It was predicted in the grooves that we would be here sometime later on down the road.

I want an audience that we might call a pop audience. Cross over to pop. Cross over to R&B. And bring those people to Brubeck and Chick Corea, you dig? A lot of people found Dave Brubeck and Chick Corea because they came to hear ‘We’re in This Love Together’ and ‘After All.’

There’s a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they’ve been wearing.

That’s Tommy, this great producer who comes in contact with people and must have a mental library of personnel who are great for this and great for that, and he brought this whole group of musicians to the project that I’d never worked with before.

Jazz told people about the special music that came out of America and about America in general and this kind of liberty and freedom that we have.

I’m not sure it’s a better music world of appreciation and performance. I think the listener is a different guy, and listening is something he does in passing, with other stuff going on. There’s less care and understanding of the relationship between the song and the listener.

My eyes went blank, and I stared off, and the music started. It was raining, and the sun was shining at the same time, and there were these big bay windows, and there was the blue in the sky, and the sun on the trees, and it was drizzling.

I tour a lot and interview a lot. I’m on the Internet and doing stuff. I go out and promote. I’ve got a bass drum and a sandwich sign and a washboard. You just have to shout louder and louder that you’re still alive.

I slept fourteen feet from a polka tavern as a kid growing up. I heard polkas all night long, people singing and drinking beers and having a great time. I know more polkas than Frankie Yancovic!

The band and I really enjoy working for people who enjoy the music. I haven’t made a bazillion dollars doing this. I do it because I love it. I did it for free and will do it for free in the morning.

I don’t know how much more what I’ve done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There’ve been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.

Learn it well in your head, know it well, pick things you know and bring the old you and all the experience you have from singing these various kinds of feelings that are still related to what I have done in the rest of my career.

Music is such a balm. Always has been. It’s such a heartbeat, like blood thrumming through the womb. That’s why music appeals to people.

You know, I think in some kinds of ways, we are all born into stuff that gives us no choice.

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don’t think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.

The Metropole Orchestra is like Count Basie or Duke Ellington with strings… it’s strings that swing. Strings that swing like Dizzy Gillespie… keep swinging, baby. And when you have all of that special excellence of the Metropole Orchestra, then your music just flies – it soars in a way that’s really magical.

Music – special magic that communicates feelings and sensitivities that are human and what is so wonderful about the art. Let your kids get involved in the arts and study this workshop of human sensitivities, sadness, joy, happiness and aware of sadness and joy and happiness in their lives.

I came along with that crowd of singer-songwriters who were able to make their own statements in such a personal way that it changed the industry: Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Sly and the Family Stone.