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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
One night we went and broke in another door, and I broke into this door and there was a piano there, and I just walked around the room to see what was there first, and then hands kind of hit the keyboard and I remembered from Chicago next door when I was a kid, there was a little girl named Lucy that used to play piano, and it brought everything back because I was never very good at music when I was little. I never paid any attention to it in school. And, from that moment on when I touched those keys, I said, "This is it. I'm not going to do the other thing again. I'm going here." And, that's what happened.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
Lionel Hampton's band came through Seattle then too. That was a very significant thing in my life because as I said before we played with Bumps Blackwell's band and Charlie Taylor's band for Billie Holiday, and then Billy Eckstine, at 14 and 15 years old. So, Hamp came through there then, and that was my dream to be with that band, more than any band because I saw every band that came through: Stan Kenton, Basie, Duke, Louis Armstrong, everybody. I was out in front hypnotized every night. I just couldn't believe it, that there is the way to be a man, to have your dignity, to be proud of what you do. And there were 18 musicians -- there was something about that kind of unity, too -- that were really playing good, and made military bands look like military bands, or the white traveling bands, you know. But, there was something about it that just really hit a serious chord in me, and I wanted to know everything about it. That's why I wanted to write so quick. As soon as I picked up the trumpet I heard arrangements in my head of those ensembles. How do you write for 18 musicians, or eight brass and five saxes, and not have them playing the same notes?
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
So far, I haven't found any experience that is more pleasurable than trying to -- it takes you three, two nights to sit down at the blank page of score paper and then try to imagine and hear that orchestra sound in your head and put what you think is going to sound like you think it sounds on that paper for each instrument. And, finally having the orchestra there, and when you do the down beat -- to hear that sound -- there's no experience in the world like that.
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Quincy Jones
Music Impresario
If it's in human nature, or nature, or just to pay attention to see what it's all about because I think African music is so powerful and probably governs the rhythm of every music in the world is because it's taken straight from nature, you know. You know that the birds did not imitate flutes. It's the reverse. And thunder didn't imitate the drums. It was the reverse. And so, the elements of nature, what it comes from, that's the most powerful force there is. It's like a melody. You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God. There's really no technique for melodies, really. I guess there's something about music that's always fascinated me and I apply what the essence of what that's about in everything I do, whether we do film or magazines or whatever it is. You can't touch it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it, you can't see it. You just feel it and it hangs in the air. It owns -- it dominates -- every time period. String quartets had its own time period and nobody can ever change it, because it's hanging up there in heaven some place.
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Naomi Judd
Country Music Artist and Social Advocate
And one night, I handed her an old flanky guitar, just so we could keep from killing each other, and something magical happened when I handed her that guitar. I said, "Hmm, very interesting." She just acted like it was an appendage of herself, and she would sit, literally for hours, hunkered over this thing, and I went, "Hmm. Now, if I was to participate with her, what would happen?" And really, it was that natural in evolution. There was never any epiphany where you went, "Bingo, I've got it. We'll go to Nashville and be country singers." We were just trying to communicate with each other.
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Naomi Judd
Country Music Artist and Social Advocate
So that as we lived in a splendid isolation on this hilltop in Morrill, Kentucky, I was doing it for a multitude of reasons. One was to sort of decompress and demystify the Hollywood thing -- you know, the artifice, the greed, the commercialization -- just sort of to turn down the background noise. I needed the solitude definitely for my studies, and I really wanted the girls to understand their Appalachian heritage. I had already been hip to it my whole life, but I really wanted them to understand this very rich legacy that they had. And this was just such fertile ground for them to each tap into that intuition that gets beat out of kids these days. So when I took away all of this overstimulation and they really had to hear their own inner voices and open up, like I said, Wynonna was 12 and Ashley was eight at that point, and Ashley, frankly, didn't need music to communicate. She was one of these popular, well-rounded, "straight A" kind of kids, very autonomous. So I handed her a book, and the same thing happened. She began to develop a fantasy life with the written page.
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Hamid Karzai
President of Afghanistan
Wherever I go in Afghanistan, I have this feeling, wherever I go. Even when I went to a northern province some three months ago, when there was an earthquake, an earthquake that had totally destroyed the northern part of a town, completely, even then, at that time, when I asked people, "What more can I do for you?" nobody responded. And I said again to them, about 4,400 of them, I said again, "What more can I do for you?" Nobody responded. And then the third time, when I insisted, somebody got up and said, "Nothing for our daily life," or nothing to ameliorate our present situation, "But the future. We want the future to be all right." That was very important.
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Hamid Karzai
President of Afghanistan
They never ask me for food. They never ask me for help for their daily lives. They always ask for help for the future, for the future of Afghanistan. That is what we are concentrating on, a good future for the Afghan people. And that future has begun with our children going to school. For me, the happiest moments of my life are when I go out in the morning sometimes, some places and I see children going to school. That has been possible because of the help that America gave, because of the help the international community gave, and I thank you very much for that.
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