Herbie Hancock Quotes

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

Don't be afraid to expand yourself, to step out of your comfort zone. That's where the joy and the adventure lie.

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.

You would not exist if you did not have something to bring to the table of life.

Music is the tool to express life - and all that makes a difference.

A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students' creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

Forget about trying to compete with someone else. Create your own pathway. Create your own new vision.

I think there's a great beauty to having problems. That's one of the ways we learn.

You can practice to attain knowledge, but you can't practice to attain wisdom.

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

The most valuable things in life are priceless. They are courage, compassion, wisdom, respect for ourselves and others, and a host of characteristics that we call the beauty of the human spirit.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

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.

Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept. He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were.

Life is not about finding our limitations, it's about finding our infinity.

A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He's above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.

The strongest thing that any human being has going is their own integrity and their own heart. As soon as you start veering away from that, the solidity that you need in order to be able to stand up for what you believe in and deliver what's really inside, it's just not going to be there.

Creativity and artistic endeavors have a mission that goes far beyond just making music for the sake of music.

People always want to protect what's really going on inside. They want to kind of make visible something that looks more pleasant than what may be happening inside of themselves.

I have to care and I have to be honest and have the courage to be vulnerable. If that happens, then that's the best I can do. To just be a puppet for the audience is not very courageous. Just to do whatever they say they want - because a lot of times people will hear something new that they hadn't heard before and get turned on by a new experience and will want to hear more of that.

Jazz is a music that is open enough to borrow from any other form of music, and has the strength to influence any other form of music.

Nobody told me I was a child prodigy.

You don't need the fame to be vital.

I like the idea of an eclectic approach, incorporating jazz with other forms and other genres of music.

I never dreamed I would be a Goodwill Ambassador, and for UNESCO. Perfect organization. It is apolitical and it's about education, science and culture. I mean that is what I live. That is what UNESCO is really about; it's all about bringing human beings together with one common goal, which is to move human kind forward.

I keep recycling and repackaging music that I've done in the past, as though I can't write anymore. Like, okay, I'm done with that. But I need to kind of prod myself again into come on, Herbie, get off your duff and start writing some new music.

Of course, it's not the technique that makes the music; it's the sensitivity of the musician and his ability to be able to fuse his life with the rhythm of the times. This is the essence of music.

It's not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

I'm very conscious of the idea of trying to each time present something that I haven't presented before. It's a challenge to me to find something new, to find something innovative, but it's also very exciting.

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

I look for what's of value and extract that. I don't look to criticize.

I learned the importance of being nonjudgmental, taking what happens and trying to make it work.That's something you should apply to life.

The arts have always served relationships between people of different cultures so well. In a way, the arts function as a very serious kind of ambassador.

But I have to be careful not to let the world dazzle me so much that I forget that I'm a husband and a father.

It might be something as simple as saying the right word to the right person at the right time-and that could change the course of history. You never really know. But the whole thing is to work at the process of being in sync with the universe, so that everything will align at the proper time so that you can deliver that which is your life mission. And that's why we're here as individuals. And then there's our contribution to the collective. It makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

Since time is a continuum, the moment is always different, so the music is always different.

I'm always interested in looking forward toward the future. Carving out new ways of looking at things.

So in other words, we were constantly challenged to grow, and thats what a master does.

We are eternally linked not just to each other but our environment.

All you have to do is play one note. But it needs to be the right note.

I spent five years, at least, working with Miles. Together, we recorded ESP, Nefertiti, Sorcerer -- and I can tell you; each of these albums instantly became jazz classics. Hey, we had Wayne Shorter playing tenor sax, Ron [Carter] on bass, Tony Williams played drums. That was great band we had.

I hope that I can make good music out of whatever genre I go into. Just to prove to myself that I can.

One thing that attracted me to Buddhism was the support for this larger vision of values.

I don't go around, the way many musicians do, with earbuds in my ear listening to my iPod all day and just sticking my head in the music all the time.

In the world of Art there are no wrong choices.

While knowledge may provide useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future.

I've been curious ever since I was a little kid.

Globalization means we have to re-examine some of our ideas, and look at ideas from other countries, from other cultures, and open ourselves to them. And that's not comfortable for the average person.