Jazz is rhythm and meaning.
There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
Jazz isn’t the kind of music you’re going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music.
It bugs me when people try to analyze Jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not, it’s feeling.
The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.
What we play is life.
To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.
When rock came in, people didn’t know what to do. Even Sinatra, he didn’t know what to do. The music was changing. And it’s changing now.
It’s easy in music to tell what’s good. It’s hard to tell what’s bad.
A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write to ultimately be at peace with himself.
Musicians need enough experience to develop a vocabulary.
First of all, I never strive for identity. ThatÂ’s something that just has happened automatically as a result, I think, of just putting things together, tearing things apart and putting it together my own way, and somehow I guess the individual comes through eventually.
Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
Risk is at the heart of Jazz. Every note we play is a risk.
If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.
In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.
It’s important to find your own voice and do something of your own.
