Erroll Garner

I love it. When they stop imitating me then I’ll start wondering where I’m going wrong. Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.

Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.

The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can’t ‘not’ be a musician.

I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy and Bird.

Music is the great arbiter of the world, the key to central harmony and a necessary requirement of human emotion.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one’s own.

The emotional reaction is all that matters.

It’s not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

It’s up to the individual to keep up with the times.

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.

I went through a struggle, and I really needed to get myself together and connect with my purpose, which is music.