Quotes from Lizz Wright

Where I come from, music is not a business. Sharing music is a business, but music is not a business. It comes from the people and belongs to the people.

At 16, I was going to church and playing music for church, and Dad would only pay for piano lessons so I could play at church.

Surrender is working with what happens.

My father was very strict, a very militant parent, because he wanted us to be very focused kids. He sold the televisions, so we didn't watch TV. And he didn't want any music playing that wasn't gospel or inspirational music. In fact, he didn't even like a lot of gospel because he thought it was too bluesy.

I'm a real Otis Redding fan, and I just think he sounds so good. He sounds like he's always at the end of a long day, and he just won't give up. I just love his wearied devotion - that beautiful, beautiful, weathered sound.

It's hard to know who you are until you're cracked open a little bit.

I'm a preacher's kid, I'm big-boned, I have giant feet, and I've always been able to run fast, and so I had this sense of, 'I can't fail. I'm invincible. I'm made of green juice and concrete; nothing's gonna happen to me.'

The women and the men are teachers and preachers in my family, and a little bit of both those fell on me.

Singing in church is a very different approach to music. It's very much about transcending the idea of self. It's about finding something greater that connects all of us. Gospel music is about tapping into that.

By high school, I was putting the music for the services together and teaching Sunday school to everybody's kids.

Music is primal: when it's done without pretension, you can really feel the shape of someone's soul.

Gardening is a working meditation for me. It helps me remember process, and it helps me remember patience.

There's a lot of pressure that comes from the mainstream stuff, and already people who have been saying - people who don't know any better - have been saying things to me like, 'You should really think about neosoul. You'd definitely be more successful in that.' But that's not my expression.

I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn't interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.

I am more prolific when I have something to respond to. I get my juice from people and real stories and things that seem common but are amazing.

Whoever is playing with me, they participate in the arrangement; I learned from Craig Street to really pool the stories and the skill and the voices of everybody around you on the bandstand to build an arrangement in the moment.

I never left jazz. The relationship between structure and improvisation - that constant conversation and tension - I've always wanted in every genre and song that I perform.

I come from a family that has grown their own food from well into times of slavery, provided for themselves and people around them. So I found, through conversations about the earth and about the house with my neighbors, a lot of common ground.

Jazz has provided the framework for all the other stuff that I've done.

Where I fit genre-wise, it's hard to tell. It's a fickle wind. But I have to believe there's always going to be a place for the songs inside of me.

I always want to do good work and enjoy doing it.

For me, I just want to sing about life. And since I come from a spiritual background, I turned to jazz, because I feel it's still sacred, like gospel. It's serious music, but it allows room to sing about so much other stuff as well.

A lot of people in the African-American community are raised by grandmothers, and that relationship is a special bond and circle.

The truth is, when you want a great show, it's not 'entertaining' the audience - it's you sharing with them... an experience of communion.