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I ... started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that's just the way it came out.
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Spoken in VOA interview broadcast on Pop Chronicles Show 22 - Smack Dab in the Middle on Route 66: A skinny dip in the easy listening mainstream.

 

Nat King Cole

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I hope that people who liked him resist the temptation to turn his life and death into some dumb romantic fantasy--he was so much better than that. Not everyone can get up and sing something they take a liking to and make it their own, sing true to their heart and be curious about all different strains of music. Corpus Christi Carol was a completely conceived interpretation. I'd never heard the piece before and when I heard the original I realised what Jeff had done was even more amazing. He'd taken it into his own world. That's something my favorite classical musicians can do, be themselves but use all that expertise to make the music more beautiful. Jeff did that naturally. Only a handful of people are capable of that. I was amazed when he did meltdown. I asked him what he wanted to sing and he said he'd like to do one of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder in the original German! Absolutely f**king fearless. He was convinced he could sing it without rehearsal, just because he liked it. In the end he did a Purcell song, Dido's Lament, which is in danger of sounding incredibly poignant in retrospect: 'Remember me but forget my fate'. But he also sang Boy With the Thorn In His Side because he liked it, and Grace to show something of himself. When he started singing Dido's Lament at the rehearsal, there were all these classical musicians who could not believe it. Here's a guy shuffling up on-stage and singing a piece of music normally thought to be the property of certain types of specifically developed voice, and he's just singing, not doing it like a party piece, but doing something with it. My last memory of him was at the little party in the green room afterwards. There were all these people sitting round Jeff who'd never met before - Fretwork, the viol group, a classical pianist and some jazz player --all talking and laughing about music. He'd charmed everybody. I'd much rather remember that than anything.

 

Jeff Buckley

 

I started to sing like myself — as opposed to imitating Nat Cole, which I had done for a while — when I started singing like Ray Charles, it had this spiritual and churchy, this religious or gospel sound. It had this holiness and preachy tone to it. It was very controversial. I got a lot of criticism for it.

 

Ray Charles

 

He was the foundation out of which stemmed the whole edifice of modern jazz piano; every jazz pianist since Bud either came through him or is deliberately attempting to get away from playing like him.

 

Bud Powell

 

When we started the idea was to have one big song and it would have little parts. We kinda got the idea from Wire. And we were trying to purge the Blue Oyster Cult and Creedence so we wouldn’t be derivative. We felt tainted because a lot of these punk rockers had just started playing and wrote their songs immediately; they didn’t have the years in the bedroom copying records like us. And then there were the punk rockers singing their songs and it dawned on us that they were trying to tell us something that was on their minds. We grew up during the ’60s, although our teen years were all in the ’70s, and I think part of the ’60s was that this is a country born out of protest, so it’s traditional to embrace the idea that things might not be working out so right, and ask what does it all mean? So a lot of times the songs are kind of little weird summaries of the discussions we had with each other.

 

Mike Watt

 

I started writing instrumentals but Roma pointed out they were very visual, so she started writing lyrics .. and Nicky had this idea of creating a wall of sound and started multi-tracking my voice.

 

Enya