There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.
Jazz stands for freedom.
My dream was to have a steady job, was not to be on the road, to exist like a guy that goes to work as a mechanic or a carpenter and knows he’s gonna have a job.
It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.
Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.
I never wanted this kind of life that I’m still living.
I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.
Damn it, when I’m bombastic, I have my reasons. I want to be bombastic: take it or leave it.
Kinship doesn’t come from skin color. It’s in your soul and your mind.
You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.
And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.
Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.
There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.
No person in their right mind would want to put their family through what I’ve had to put my family through.
It’s like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.
There is a time where you’re beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than your usual ideas.
I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.
