Don’t bullshit, just play.
Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.
Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.
A beat is a moment in the life a groove.
Jazz music is the power of now.
Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.
I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel.
I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.
Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.
In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
Let the music speak for itself.
I think I was supposed to play Jazz.
A guitar is something you can hold and love and it’s never going to bug you. But here’s the secret about the guitar – it’s defiant. It will never let you conquer it. The more you get involved with it, the more you realize how little you know.
Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.
Anything I do has to be directly related to my music. If it isn’t, I don’t really see a point to it.
I went through a lot of mental pains and anguish about choosing between jazz and classical. I realized that where I functioned was where I should be, and where I functioned was in jazz, so that was it.
Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.
The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.
Jazz stands for freedom.
It’s the same for listeners. If you can’t stand your girlfriend, can’t take it anymore, put on your headphones and escape into another world.
In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters and gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle-class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.
