Bill Evans

I’m believe that all people are in possession of what might be called a ‘universal musical mind.’

Especially, I want my work-and the trios if possible-to sing.

You give up your own personality when you imitate somebody.

Everyone is working who should be.

Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

Musicians have a really big part to play in spreading messages because they’re able to reach a large portion of people on an emotional level. Artists reach people at their heart; it’s the only time we meet in one place and put our differences aside. When you’re in a forum listening to music, all you feel in that moment is love and the understanding.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years.

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

Without jazz, life would be a mistake.

I never really thought about becoming a professional musician.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

Music is interior decoration.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

The weird thing about bass is the simplest stuff to do is the hardest.

I don’t think anybody steals anything; all of us borrow.

I think I was supposed to play Jazz.

[Ben Taylor] He is an interesting combination of the two of us. His voice box is more like mine but the way his tongue sits in his mouth, and the way he pronounces words, is just like James Taylor.

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 merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.