Chet Baker

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

What a guy, what a fool am I, to think my breaking heart could kid the moon.

What a fool I am to think my breaking heart could kid the moon.

He almost adds a Chet-like sound to it.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

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 is what I hear and something that I live by.

Music should always be an adventure.

If you can’t get your songs to people one way, you have to find another.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

Let your life be your music and let your music be your life.

Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

You gotta mean it and you gotta treat it gentle.

A young tenor player was complaining to me that Coleman Hawkins made him nervous. Man, I told him Hawkins was supposed to make him nervous! Hawkins has been making other sax players nervous for forty years!

Whenever I fill out the job description I put ‘songwriter’, never ‘singer’ or ‘artist.’ Singers come and go.

For me, I started on a Les Paul and went through years of playing other guitars and just came back full circle to what was more natural to me.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

I never heard of a Jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so what are you going to do… play for the walls?

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else.