Gary Burton

Always keep reaching.

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

I don’t have a definition of Jazz. You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.

I am only a mixture of countless influences and thanks to that I am able to find my own style of playing.

The reward for playing Jazz is playing Jazz.

The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen.

There’s a sadness to all kinds of music if you want to hear it. There’s also happiness to it if you want to hear it.

You’ve got to be willing to put stuff on the line, otherwise it doesn’t have much meaning.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

Start well and end well. The middle will look after itself.

The more you listen, the more your hear.

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.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that’s when I was born.

If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters and gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle-class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.

I always play what I feel. I always feel like me, but I’m a different me every day. I get ideas from everything. A big color, the sound of water and wind, or a flash of something cool. Playing is like life. Either you feel it or you don’t.

Jazz is one of the few things you can do in society to express yourself freely and creatively.