I travel like a maniac. I travel more than anyone I know. I love

In a voice quick as a trumpet break, Quincy Jones confesses: “I travel like a maniac. I travel more than anyone I know. I love learning the languages.” Hear the charge folded inside the charm. He is telling us that the world itself is a conservatory, and that the tuition is paid in miles and vowels. To move is to study; to study is to listen; to listen is to be changed. In this oracle, travel is not escape—it is apprenticeship—and languages are not trophies but tools that tune the soul to other hearts.

The ancients would nod at this. They taught that wisdom lives in the road and the market as surely as in the academy. When we travel, we measure our certainties against new horizons; when we learn languages, we lay down the weapons of assumption and take up the instruments of trust. A borrowed word is a bridge; a correctly placed honorific is a key; a shared idiom is a soft light in a strange room. Thus the pilgrim’s grammar begins with humility: “teach me,” “show me,” “how do you say…?”

To call the pace “like a maniac” is not to glorify frenzy; it is to confess a sacred urgency. The world is wide, life is brief, and the music we might make together will not wait forever. Airports become cloisters, and flight routes shape their own liturgy—arrive, greet, taste, listen, rehearse, record, rejoice. In this rhythm, learning a handful of phrases is not courtesy alone; it is collaboration prelude. You pronounce a greeting; the room loosens. You attempt a proverb; the room warms. You sing a chorus in their tongue; the room becomes a family.

Consider a lamp from history: Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan wayfarer who walked and sailed more than most could imagine. He moved through courts and caravanserais, mosques and markets, stitching his fate to strangers by the thread of speech—Arabic here, Persian there, dialects everywhere. It was not only his feet that carried him; it was his ear. Doors opened because he honored the music of other mouths. What he wrote home was more than distance and danger; it was the discovery that language is a passport stamped in the heart.

And listen through another lens: music itself is a language older than borders. The producer or bandleader who lands in Rio, Lagos, or Tokyo learns that a city’s rhythm has grammar—the placement of the backbeat, the length of a blue note, the way silence is held before release. When Quincy Jones says he loves learning the languages, he is speaking of conjugations and cadences both, of verbs and grooves alike. Tongues widen the ear; widened ears make wider music.

The origin of this wisdom is the traveler’s ledger: mispronunciations forgiven with laughter; recipes learned by watching hands; lullabies traded after sessions; a proverb that rescues a negotiation; a taxi ride where a single local word turns a fare into a conversation. Over time, the pilgrim discovers that mastery is not domination but devotion. You do not conquer a city; you court it. You do not collect a culture; you care for it. And in return, the world gives you a larger self—one that can say “we” in more ways than one.

What, then, is the teaching to carry like a pocket compass? Make a rule of three: travel, learn, listen. Before you go, learn ten phrases that honor dignity—hello, thank you, please, forgive me, delicious, beautiful, safe journey, how much, where, and why. Upon arrival, find a room where locals gather—market, café, rehearsal space—and buy time with attention. Each night, write one sentence from that day in the new tongue, and one sentence about what the day taught your old heart. Do this, and you will find what the maestro found: the map grows merciful; strangers turn into teachers; and the world, once large and lonely, becomes a choir that invites you to sing in many keys.