Explore Quotes on Music

I grew up with a sense of music being a very spiritual experience while playing in church and with parents who were socially aware, always teaching me to look beyond the obvious in understanding how the world works.

We learned at a young age, with our dad, that even if you weren't doing something, you had to look like you were, or some hard labor was coming your way. That's the reason I started practicing music - when I was practicing, Pops left me alone.

When I started saxophone, my dad took me to my uncle's church, and I started playing there, too. At its best, music serves a greater purpose, and that showed me a whole other side to spiritual jazz, one which you can hear in the music - the gospel and blues feel, the soul that's embedded into the more avant-garde records.

Music is an expression of life, who you are, and what you've been through.

People need to realize that even the greatest jazz musicians, when they listen to jazz, they're not like, analyzing it and deconstructing it - they're enjoying it. It's like listening to any other style of music. It's saying something to you, and you kind of just absorb it.

Hip-hop is a collage. It samples from all different styles of music.

Music doesn't come out of you, it comes through you. You are almost like a messenger.

A legacy is a lot of times determined by how people accept your music. And sometimes people's legacy starts late or starts early, or they last a long time or a short amount of time. As a musician, I've never taken an approach of wanting to try to control that because I don't think that I can.

I was hearing music in my head and trying to play it on the clarinet, but it didn't match.' Then, literally the first day, it did with the saxophone. I was like, 'Oh man, that's what I've been trying to do; this is what it's supposed to sound like.'

Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

Music is this medium to express who I am and what I've been through and my thoughts and what my feelings on the world are. We're all on the planet together; I'm just using this medium to express how I see it.

In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm just taking the music that comes to me and trying to make it as beautiful as I can. You can't really predict or control how people will receive that music.

When I was working on 'To Pimp A Butterfly' and 'DAMN.,' I'm really making music for Kendrick. It's a different mindset than when I'm making music for me. I'm trying to get into his head and figure out what he wants because it's his vision. That's what I expect from people when they're playing on my records.

At the time of 'The Epic,' as a core band, we were all spending so much time apart making music for other people that by the time we got together - even though we grew up together and there's a special connection we have - it was like a rare privilege to come together.

L.A. is a big city that has a lot of music in it but is not necessarily known for it. A lot of musicians got lost in that. You can make a living; you can gig a lot within the city and never get out of it. That was something that me and my friends, our generation, were afraid of happening to us.

I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was 'The Rite of Spring.' That's what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it.

The golf swing is very, very rhythmic. There's a certain tempo to it, just like in music.

I'm a mutt as far as music is concerned because I listen to everything.

I think music will always be a big part of my life. I can't go five minutes without singing, sometimes unconsciously. And people stare at me, and I'm wondering why they're staring, and then I'm realizing that I'm belting out a tune.

Hosting 'SNL' was something I'd always wanted to do. The show allowed me to play to my strengths - mixing music with comedy seemed like a way into that world.

Music is for dreamers, I think.