Grace Testani

Just to keep it interesting I’ll tune the guitar randomly, so I don’t know what’s going to come out.

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

Despite the fact I’m a professional performer, it’s true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.

I’ve sung a lot of emotional songs, but when you’re writing it’s very difficult to decide what to reveal.

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

I never thought about being famous or rich. I just thought, Oh, I’ll get a nice little girl and go and play every night, and I’d be happy. And that worked for a while. But the little girl’s mother didn’t trust a guy with a horn.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.