I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.
One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.
If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?
Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.
The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.
Once we’re inside a tune, we can do anything with it.
If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.
If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.
We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.
I don’t like recording studios – except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.
I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.
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.
I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.
Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.
Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.
Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.
