Love is sweeping the country.
One can be very happy without demanding that others agree with them.
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
I became a singer to sing my songs. They’re so hip who else is going to sing them?
Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.
There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.
If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!
Your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’ So hush little baby don’t you cry.
I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.
You have a mentor or teacher and you learn all he can show you.
My chops were not as fast… [but] I just learned more on what was in my mind than what was in my chops. I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it’s the right one, and it will probably whip the guy with twenty notes.
A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.
Jazz is not just music, it’s a way of life, it’s a way of being, a way of thinking… The new inventive phrases we make up to describe things – all that to me is jazz just as much as the music we play.
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.
I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.
Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.
I don’t meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.
I find my inspiration in myself.
