Bill Evans

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument. This is a comprehensive technique . . . a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it. What has to happen is that you develop a comprehensive technique and then say, forget that. I’m just going to be expressive through the piano.

Everyone is working who should be.

You never master the instrument. You always just strive to get better.

A guy is influenced by hundreds of people and things, and all show up in his work. To fasten on any one or two is ridiculous. I will say one thing, though. Lennie Tristano’s early records impressed me tremendously. Tunes like ‘Tautology,’ ‘Marshmallow,’ and ‘Fishin’ Around.’ I heard the fellows in his group building their lines with a design and general structure that was different from anything I’d ever heard in jazz.

If you dig it, do it. If you dig it a lot, do it again.

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

Musicians don’t retire; they stop when there’s no more music in them.

You’re just as beautiful as you feel.

Something just grabs you about a song.

Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I’d just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn’t gotten kicked out of school I wouldn’t be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.

I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.

The blues comes right back to a person’s feelings, to his daily activities in life. But rich people don’t know nothing about the blues, please believe me.

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

Seemed to me that drumming was the best way to get close to God.

Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears to the eyes of woman.