Esperanza Spalding's Quotes

I love people, and I love to be with people and to make music with people, but my natural state is to revert back to being by myself in my house, which is cool because that's where I practice and write and listen and study.

Genre boundaries are good for marketing but they all but disappear when you're a player.

I always say that the problem with jazz accessibility is not the content of the music, it's people's ability to access it.

I don't watch TV, I don't spend time on the Internet, and I don't party much. I don't text very much, either.

I grew up with an incredibly loving and supportive family that gave me the impression there were a lot of options for me out there.

I like to read, and I like dance. I don't dance, but I like to see other people dance.

I never think my music isn't easy until I got to teach it to other people.

I think there's so much negative influence on children in school settings. It becomes learning by rote to pass a test. It's not contextualized.

Jazz has always been a melting pot of influences and I plan to incorporate them all.

The benefit of the radio is, something beyond your realm of knowledge can surprise you, can enter your realm of knowledge.

There is an assumption that if you're young and pretty, you will get all these opportunities that are way beyond your musical foundation.

There's enough time in the day: If you go to bed at 10 and start your day at 6, there's a lot you can do in a day!

You can grow up with literally nothing and you don't suffer if you know you're loved and valued.

Anything I do has to have integrity, so if you just want to make music, it's not difficult finding support. The hard part for a publicist or manager is making a star.

For what I can imagine and feel and think and hear, I can hardly do anything on the acoustic bass. It used to be just pure frustration of imagining so much more and being able to get to a certain level of execution.

I just think music is so intrinsically linked with images in the culture that we live in that you'll be hard-pressed to have an experience with the music without a preconceived notion.

I write at the piano, so I write things that fit comfortably under my hands, and I'm not thinking in terms of any specific compositional methods. I'm just seeking sounds.

If you don't already know about jazz music, how would you be exposed? How would get an opportunity to find out if it spoke to you? If you get exposed to it enough, you might find a taste for it.

It's a pity that if someone who has a really profoundly potent art to share chooses not to or doesn't fit into this very thin slice of what's desirable and marketable, chances are the public will never get a chance to hear what they're doing.

My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven. I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I'd change little things in the music and write different lyrics.

On nights that I'm feeling a need to stretch personally and artistically, I tend to put together outfits that are very quirky, mismatched and over-the-top eclectic.

As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.

We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us.

The doubt of an earnest, thoughtful, patient and laborious mind is worthy of respect. In such doubt may be found indeed more faith than in half the creeds.