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Forget about trying to compete with someone else. Create your own pathway. Create your own new vision.
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You can practice to attain knowledge, but you can't practice to attain wisdom.
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Don't be afraid to expand yourself, to step out of your comfort zone. That's where the joy and the adventure lie.
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Jazz is really about the human experience. It’s about the ability of human beings to take the worst of circumstances and struggles and turn it into something creative and constructive. That’s something that’s built into the fiber of every human being. And I think that’s why people can respond to it. They feel the freedom in it. And the attributes of jazz are also admirable. It’s about dialogue. It’s about sharing. And teamwork. It’s in the moment, and it's nonjudgmental.
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I'm always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.
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While knowledge may provide useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future.
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I feel a lot more secure about the directions I take, than I might have, had I not practiced Buddhism.
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Inspiration is constantly in the air. It's up to us to develop the sensitivity to pick up on it.
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All you have to do is play one note. But it needs to be the right note.
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It's part of life to have obstacles. It's about overcoming obstacles; that's the key to happiness.
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Music isn't about music, it's about life.
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Each human being exists because there's something they have to offer for the evolution of the universe that only they can fulfill.
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I think there's a great beauty to having problems. That's one of the ways we learn.
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When you struggle to reach for something you don't know, that's where most of the interesting stuff is.
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You make different colors by combining those colors that already exist.
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The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.
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When a human being is oppressed, the natural tendency is to feel anger. Jazz is a response to oppression that is not bullets and blood. Jazz is the expression of harmony ... and at the same time of hope and freedom.
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I like to be on the edge, on the cutting edge, or be into the unknown, into the territory where I have to depend on being in the moment and depending on my instincts.
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There are a lot of records coming out, in every field of music, not just jazz.
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People are afraid to spend money now because they dont know how long theyre going to be working.
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I don't think there are any pure Africans of the African Americans, but the African part of our history was pretty much taken away from us during slavery, so the 60s gave us a chance, because of the civil rights movement, to kind of re-examine and make some sort of formal connection to our African-ness.
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I've never really been interested in doing a solo piano tour.
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Wisdom is the key to understanding the age, creating the time.
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We can all be ourselves, be true to ourselves, and all be together.