Quotes from Al Jarreau

I tour a lot and interview a lot. I'm on the Internet and doing stuff. I go out and promote. I've got a bass drum and a sandwich sign and a washboard. You just have to shout louder and louder that you're still alive.

I am inspired by all kinds of players and singers.

I don't know how much more what I've done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There've been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.

I'm this strange kind of fusion of jazz, pop, and R&B.

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.

I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

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.

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.

My mother and father come from that post-Depression, middle-of-World-War -I kind of thinking that says, 'Find a practical job. You know what I mean, Mr. Big Shot? So, you can sing a song ...'

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.

I work 'cause I have to pay the bills. But I also work 'cause I love it. I don't know what I'd do with me if I didn't have this work. It's what I've done all my life. It's my motivation. It's my satisfaction. It's my joy to stand in front of an audience to sing, to come back home and write songs. Man, it's amazing for me.

Jazz told people about the special music that came out of America and about America in general and this kind of liberty and freedom that we have.

I tour Europe a lot. They still have a love and a fascination with the basic thing about music - how it feels and that being the focus. I've got people bringing their kids. And their kids bring their kids. The grandchildren are getting selfies with their Uncle Al.

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.

The work must be its own reward. I got that early on. And I'm blessed by meeting my own standards of excellence.

You know, I think in some kinds of ways, we are all born into stuff that gives us no choice.

Once you discover that you can, then you must. And it's not easy. You have to take direct steps. You really have to count your blessings and you have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the blues.

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.

I love Sly Stone and James Brown and Stevie Wonder, and I want my music to reflect some of that.

I came along with that crowd of singer-songwriters who were able to make their own statements in such a personal way that it changed the industry: Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Sly and the Family Stone.

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.

Every good gospel singer you can hear is a scat singer; they're just using different syllables. There are a lot of jazz singers out there, and more coming out of the churches.

I'm saved every day by the intrinsic value of the work I do, which I truly enjoy.

Learn it well in your head, know it well, pick things you know and bring the old you and all the experience you have from singing these various kinds of feelings that are still related to what I have done in the rest of my career.