Bill Evans

Technique is the ability to translate your ideas into sound through your instrument.

It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not, it’s feeling.

Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.

If you take the time and your talent is real, it will last.

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

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

This guitar is such a pal. It’s a psychiatrist. It’s a doggone bartender. It’s a housewife. This guy is everything. Whenever I find that I’ve got a problem, I’ll go pick my guitar up and play. It’s the greatest pal in the whole world.

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

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.

Your ear is the final judge to what sounds right and what sounds wrong.

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

How do I know why Miles walks off the stage? Why don’t you ask him? And besides, maybe we’d all like to be like Miles, and just haven’t got the guts.

In my opinion, I think sarcasm and humor in a song, without turning it into a novelty song, is really charming.

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

A musician’s responsibility is to get as much of his art across to the public as possible.

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.

Once you have been bitten by the Jazz bug, it is not a choice anymore.

Practice 15 or 20 years and then it comes out spontaneously.

You want the audience to feel what you’re doing.