Keith Jarrett

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

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

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

Once we’re inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

If a song’s about something I’ve experienced or that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, I couldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.

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’.

Once in a while, the thumb that fits over the neck of the guitar kinda bothers me a little bit, but not that much yet. I figure in time I won’t do much because of my age.

People who are meant to be drawn to your music will find you.

Good Jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms and yells. Fine Jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great Jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of Jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.

The true musician is to bring light into people’s hearts.

I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

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

You can’t go to the store and buy a good ear and rhythm.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.

When I decided that I wanted to be a Jazz musician, I knew that it was about improvising.

When the label came to me to say, ‘would you like to do another record,’ I said, ‘Well I got these sixteen songs sitting here, so let’s do it.’ And that was pretty much it… I never stopped writing, it’s just the way that the business is now; you just try to find a different model.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people.

Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I’m honest.