Gary Burton

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

Inspiration comes from tunes you play, other musicians and your own imagination.

The reason I write music is that I feel it’s a vehicle or channel which leads to your true self, your essence.

I’ll keep evolving and put that into my songs.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel.

Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That’s when I was born.

Those who wish to sing, always find a song.

I did go through a trial-and-error period where I tried out lots of different guitars, but within a couple of years I was right back to the Les Paul. From that point it’s stayed with me ever since. I have other guitars—and I love a lot of them—but I’m most at home on a Les Paul. It’s interesting: most of the time I would even rather make a Les Paul do the things those other guitars do. From the get-go, the Les Paul spoke to me.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back… your attention.

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.