Chick Corea

Only play what you hear. If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

You don’t have to be Picasso or Rembrandt to create something. The fun of it, the joy of creating, is way high above anything else to do with the art form.

Every time I see a musician – it doesn’t matter what age – that inspires me, there’s always a secret little wish that maybe we’ll play together, because that’s how I learn and grow and so forth, you know. But hopefully there’s a lot more.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

Miles Davis was a part of my life from 1947 on. I was born in 1941 and I first heard him in 1947 on a 78 rpm. And then I followed his career, starting with his first solo album in 1951. He was an icon and inspiration and a mentor to me.

I’ve noticed that the more adventurous and in that mode that I am, it seems that the more the audience really likes it.

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

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Jazz means many things to many people, but it’s all about choices.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

Trios offer simple instrumentation, but the orchestral possibilities are so profound.

I get interested in the various ways that music is being done in the culture, and some of it I like thoroughly enough to want to learn about it. The way I have been successful at doing that is to become part of it.

A Les Paul feels like a guitar and I play differently on that and I sound too much like someone else.

It’s not uncomfortable for me to be a sideman, but I feel more comfortable as a bandleader.

Excessive reverence for the romantic illusion of original thought is the most fraudulent and destructive element in Jazz education.

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.

I never set out to find a style of my own, it just happened.