Chick Corea

Only a spiritual being has awareness.

It’s very difficult for me to dislike an artist. No matter what he’s creating, the fact that he’s experiencing the joy of creation makes me feel like we’re in a brotherhood of some kind… we’re in it together.

It’s difficult for me to dislike an artist, no matter what he’s creating.

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.

There’s such a cynicism about the phrase ‘I laughed all the way to the bank.’ It’s as though money is what you’re doing, rather than playing music. If you’re playing a money game, why not get into banking?

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.

In my family on my mother’s side we’re all church musicians first so I don’t remember a time when we weren’t doing something musical. My brothers and I sang in a little quartet, my aunts and uncles sang and my grandfather was a minister of music in our church, so walking and talking was like doing music for us.

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.

Don’t settle for style. Succeed in substance.

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

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.

When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style…I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t even want to know about chords or anything – they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive…but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz…you must abstract the principles of music which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.

10% of musicians make 90% of the money, while the remaining 90% of musicians make the 10% that’s left.

Jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.

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