Chick Corea

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

Only a spiritual being has awareness.

Art is a subject that is inundated with opinions. In fact, that’s all it is about is opinions.

My one thing is I continue to be interested and want to be a student. I don’t want to be a master. When I’m learning something, I’m in my element.

I call myself a teacher because they want me to call myself a teacher, but actually, what I’m doing is I’m studying.

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

Stevie didn’t use the technology to drive the song. He used it to enhance. I use the tools to further my work, I don’t use my work to further the tools.

I haven’t got a great jazz band and I don’t want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat’s among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It’s all in what you define as ‘real jazz.’ It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

Jazzmen are our surrogates for the unpredictable, our paladins of constant change.

The extreme dynamic and percussive possibilities of an acoustic guitar amplified through a bridge pickup have, over many years of performing, informed not only the way I play, but the way I write and sing too. My guitar taught me to sing in textures, from the roundest lingering harmonic to the sharpest snap of a pulled string. Being a percussion instrument as well as a melodic instrument, my guitar also teaches me about the relationship between rhythm and melody. Portable. Did I mention it also taught me about being portable?

We’re here to have a ball.

Invest yourself in everything you do. There’s fun in being serious.

Unless I really loved it and felt really passionate about it, I would just kind of abort the song and start a new one.

When I got started in New York, if you were different from Miles and Dizzy it was very difficult.

The music field was the first to break down racial barriers, because in order to play together, you have to love the people you are playing with, and if you have any racial inhibitions, you wouldn’t be able to do that.

Don’t bullshit, just play.

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

Keeping your artistic self as creative as possible is a balancing act.