The gradual increase in popularity of the Mersey sound forced musicians like me to almost go underground, as if we were anarchists, plotting to overthrow the music establishment. It seemed that the “trad jazz” movement was dying, and was taking folk and blues with it.

We were a blues band, really. Although we played it at a thousand miles an hour, it was recognizable as blues – at least to us it was; probably it wasn’t to anybody else.

We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.

[Asked about his "fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young" comment] What else could I have said? [...] In the first place, I never do give any thought to prizes. I work and I write, and that's it. My reward is hearing what I have done, and unlike most composers, I can hear it immediately. That's why I keep these expensive gentlemen with me. And secondly, I'm hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without, let us say, official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European music–classical music, if you will–is the only really respectable kind. I remember, for example when Franklin Roosevelt died, practically no American music was played on the air in tribute to him. We were given a dispensation, I must admit. We did one radio program dedicated to him. But by and large, then as now, jazz was the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.
The word 'jazz' has been part of the problem [...] It never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the nineteen-twenties, I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing "negro music". But it's too late for that now. The music has become so integrated you can't tell one part from the other as far as color is concerned. Well, I don't have time time to worry about it. I've got too much music on my mind.

The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.

Yo, man. R&B sucks. I mean it's a couple of people that float, but, look, for the most part, the genre sucks. Just a bunch of people singing over rap beats. You don't like a rap record? Sing over it! Everybody talking them label. "Label this, label that!" Hey, Smokey Robinson wasn't singing about Motown! Look, the Isley Brothers wasn't going "T-Neck in the motherfuckin' house". The Jacksons were not singing about Epic because nobody gave a fuck!

Beatles' "aryan" music removed any trace of black music from rock and roll: it replaced syncopated african rhythm with linear western melody, and lusty negro attitudes with cute white-kid smiles.

Commercial rock ’n’ roll music is a brutalization of the stream of contemporary Negro church music … an obscene looting of a cultural expression.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

The "music of decline" had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming bass on the organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be taken seriously; it raged as untrammeled and amateurish overproduction in all the arts.

From historical burdens such as slavery and injustice to the celebration of faith, much of the origin of African-American music reflects our national story. The work songs, shouts and hollers, spirituals, and ragtime of an earlier era laid the creative foundation for many of America' s most distinctive and popular musical genres. These include rhythm and blues, jazz, hip hop, gospel, rap, and the roots of rock and roll.

[Is "90 Millas" another crossover -- into World Music?] I can see that. The core is African rhythm -- half of the world's music comes from that. The difference between our music and American blues: Cubans may have been slaves, but in Cuba slaves became part of the family. They could buy their freedom. And they are Island people. And Island people are happier. But, you know, in the '80s, when we released "Conga," wasn't that World Music? Everywhere we went, people got it. And why? The drums. So maybe all music is World Music, and the only question is: Do you like it?

And waste their music on the savage race.