To work is to feel alive.
Just give a drum roll, announce my name and I come out and sing. I have a contract that says I’m a singer. So I sing.
I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.
One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.
If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.
In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.
Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.
Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.
Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.
If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
Everything I record, I just try to sound like me and come up with songs that suit what I do and then just go for it. I never know what the public’s going to like, anyway.
If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying.
You don’t know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.
I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.
[Stratocaster vs Les Paul] It’s a totally different animal. One is for very subtle and, I would say, more musical things that you can distract and abuse. You can’t do that with a Les Paul. It’s too delicate. It’s got a very delicate tone; most people don’t ever realize that because they are plugged into monstrous amplifiers which completely, instantaneously covers up the unique sound quality it has. All those years of development go straight out the window when you overload the amp.
All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician.
When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.
You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away and it takes away from the imagination.
Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.
Any particular style of playing which represents an authentic way of musical feeling is genuine expression.
