Tom Moulton

If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.

First I was working on classical music that didn’t move me at all. I hated it. So I decided to discover the kinds of classical music that did move me—like Chopin, Satie, Beethoven, and certain Mozart songs. Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy and it made me feel something. That’s when I realized music was inside me.

The hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: You feel this, you play this.

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

Talk of God is most often in church. Is there a God outside of church? I hope so. But how should I know? How does anybody know?

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

A kiss that is never tasted, is forever and ever wasted.

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.

The music scene is more competitive in the States.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

We’re not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton’s and couldn’t play, you might get your ass kicked.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

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