Always keep reaching.
Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.
Inspiration comes from tunes you play, other musicians and your own imagination.
The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing and instrumental personality.
I’ve had a lot of things to be proud of in my life, but none more than the Jazz festival.
My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.
I guess what people forget sometimes is that when I write songs, I write them sometimes in about 20 minutes.
We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to arrive at something new and different.
It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.
Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.
Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.
I say, ‘Play your own way. Don’t play what the public wants. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you’re doing – even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years’.
You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn’t know how to read music is over.
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
Practicing is like getting your vocabulary together to use on the gig.
[In 1972] At the moment, we’re getting the same thrill from seeing the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Jo Jo Gunne, and Judee Sill happenÂ… It’s as hard to do it with Jackson Browne as it was to do it with Joni five years ago.
I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable.
