Al Jarreau Quotes
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I still have a pretty lively audience in German and across Europe. And I continue to say, 'Thank you, God,' for making me smart enough to avoid getting hit by trucks and going out and finding myself an audience abroad. Which includes Asia - from Jakarta to Japan. Working hard at finding an audience abroad.
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The work must be its own reward. I got that early on. And I'm blessed by meeting my own standards of excellence.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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Since the beginning of my recording career in 1975, I have had a little difficulty because the pop stations think I'm a jazzer who doesn't have a feeling for pop, so it's hard to get my records played. Similarly, black urban radio doesn't understand that with my R&B roots, I am more than a jazz singer. So I get pigeonholed.
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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.
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I grew up the son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, so I was really close to the church and sang church music between sips at my bottle, you know? I sat on the piano bench next to my mother. She was the church organist, so that music is deeply inside of me.
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I am a distance runner, a marathoner... literally and figuratively.
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I had five brothers and sisters. Four of them older, and some of them played instruments, and we would get together and have family recitals and raise money for the church. I belonged to a wonderful church community that encouraged me to sing.
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I think being a little older and a little more determined and being a little more evolved in my case and maturity in the kind of music I was doing and how I was doing it really helped to keep me grounded and with an audience that could appreciate what I was doing, who grew with me and evolved with me and kept me alive and around.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a little bit nervous for us with all of this electronically generated new hyper-space that we've moved into, where not only people but also economies and systems, like banking, are left to zeros and ones. I want to be more than a zero or one.
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It's always been about making music. I've never gotten caught up with the trappings. You can't get caught up in the limousines and the chicks. The most important thing is the music.
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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.
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What I try to get beyond is playing music at people and, instead, to play music with people because audience members are constantly part of the experience. What they say in their body language, what they say in their eyes, what they sing with me... it's an 'us,' and there's a communication that's like... it's like church, man.
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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.
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I'm saved every day by the intrinsic value of the work I do, which I truly enjoy.
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We are just fanatics about using the technology to make it all wonderful. We laughed at the fact that we were having such a great time working this way.
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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.