I couldn’t do anything without faith. I couldn’t open up my eyes, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t sing.
BOBBY MCFERRINMusic is still part of my spiritual life. Sometimes I sing my prayers. When I get audiences singing, I hope I’m helping them feel connected to something beyond themselves.
More Bobby McFerrin Quotes
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Improvisation means coming to the situation without rigid expectations or preconceptions. The key to improvisation is motion.
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I bury my mind in my book, the Bible. Every morning it’s the first thing that I do. I’ve been doing it for years and years.
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I’d actually been making my living as an organist with bands since I was probably 15 or 16 years old, and then as a senior in high school I put together a jazz quintet called The Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet.
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You keep going forward, fearful or not, living from moment to moment. That’s how life is.
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If I stand there, appreciating the world around me as full of amazing sounds and the possibility of new ones,
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I think play and joy and feeling good deserve more of our time. I don’t see why adults are supposed to grow out of those things.
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I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I’m still and quiet inside, I’ll begin. It’s very personal; it has to be.
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One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece.
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So I want to come back here [to Israel] to see the places that I read about every day. It’s very important to my faith to feed [my] spirit in Israel.
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Don’t just play the licks you know. We’re all improvising all the time – it’s good to recognize that and embrace it.
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The audience is like my instrument. It’s not just me up there, it’s collaborative.
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This is what I want everyone to experience at the end of my concert… everyone has this sense of rejoicing. I don’t want them to be blown away by what I do,
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The true musician is to bring light into people’s hearts.
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I want them to have this sense of real, real joy from the depths of their being. Because I think when you take them to that place, then you open up a place where grace can come in.
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When I was figuring out how to perform solo, I wanted to move back and forth between bass riffs, melody, and harmony, so I often used sounds instead of — or alongside — the words of a song.
BOBBY MCFERRIN