Keith Jarrett

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

People like the idea of the trio and so I did mostly trio.

When rock music came in, I wasn’t bitter about it. I was puzzled.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

If you play a tune and a person don’t tap their feet, don’t play the tune.

Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.

And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.

Even if you have some brilliant jazz ideas, it’s going to be difficult to get them across unless you have 1-a distinctive sound or 2- a loud sound. These are musts.

I hear beauty and elegance combined with passion and fire.

You have to pack as much as you can in an hour or 70 minutes. This time around it was 15 songs, so it was a challenge to get them all the right length so you could get them all on.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Musicians need enough experience to develop a vocabulary.

Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!

Three months. I was playing the organ for three months. It was a challenge for me in the beginning.

I’m trying to make music a sensual expression, not and academic experiment.

[On urging Nyro to tell Barbara Streisand that ‘Wedding Bell Blues’ had been personally written for her] It’s not a big lie.