Let my children have music.
Jazz music is a language of the emotions.
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.
Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
I’m too busy playing. When I’m playing I don’t pay attention to who’s listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don’t listen to one instrument; you listen to music.
Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
We quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.
Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.
Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.
We go in there and we work on altering those ideas and in many cases go in different directions.
Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.
Music isn’t just learning notes and playing them. You learn notes to play the music of your soul.
I never wanted to be like other blues singers. I might like hearing them play, but I’ve never wanted to be anyone other than myself. There are a few people that I’ve wished I could play like, but when I tried, it didn’t work.
Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I’m concerned with retaining that process.
Jazz has always been a man telling the truth about himself.
The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.
I started as a writer and when I sent my demos out everyone wanted to know who was singing and if that person wanted a record deal.
I went through a lot of mental pains and anguish about choosing between jazz and classical. I realized that where I functioned was where I should be, and where I functioned was in jazz, so that was it.
[In 1972] At the moment, we’re getting the same thrill from seeing the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Jo Jo Gunne, and Judee Sill happenÂ… It’s as hard to do it with Jackson Browne as it was to do it with Joni five years ago.
Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.
