Keith Jarrett

I don’t like recording studios – except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

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.

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.

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

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

I’m not like a legend that – so I’m sort of in the middle in this sort of gray area where, you know, I’m creating music, and I’m not saying there isn’t an audience, because there is; because all of those people go out and spend $80 to $150 on a concert ticket.

It’s important to find your own voice and do something of your own.

Our music is generally the music I would play way back when I was in the record business. So I’ll play World Waiting For The Sunrise and How High The Moon, maybe Over The Rainbow, some standards. But it depends upon the artist that comes up – if people like a certain kind of music, I will focus the show that way. Whoever walks up on to the stage is the star – he is the picture, we are the frame. The frame is there to make the star look better – let’s make this fellow the best he’s ever going to be.

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

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.

One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

Do not fear mistakes, there are none.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

Jazz without the Blues is like BBQ without the sauce.

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I’ve heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn’t swinging.

Living is easy with eyes closed.