Music Quotes

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

Despite the fact I’m a professional performer, it’s true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

If you don’t know what it is, don’t mess with it.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.

I hate to think of Jazz as black and white, something political.

The true musician is to bring light into people’s hearts.

The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.

Music washes away the dust of every day life.

A Jazz musician is supposed to find his voice, find his niche and do his thing.

I am a writer – that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

Don’t bullshit, just play.

It’s easy to play any musical instrument, just touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!

I’m glad I don’t have perfect pitch because it can drive you crazy.

The sign of a mature musician is knowing what not to play.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.