Rokia Traore Music Quotations

Not what you would call a musical family, but my father used to play saxophone, and I discovered many genres of music when I was a child.

Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.

I think about all these influences and musical cultures, then the opinion of the audience is of course important, but when I'm working on an album or a new project, I'm not all the time thinking about what the audience will think about it.

I loved music - listening and playing - but of course I could not imagine I would be a professional musician. It really happened step by step.