Jeff Beck

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever.

A Les Paul feels like a guitar and I play differently on that and I sound too much like someone else.

My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me. It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice.

I don’t care about the rules, if I don’t break the rules at least 10x every song then I’m not doing my job.

I play the way I do cause it allows me to come up w/ the sickest sounds possible. That’s the point now isn’t it?

I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

There are a million good tunes.

I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.

Sometimes when you start losing detail, whether it’s in music or in life, something as small as failing to be polite, you start to lose substance.

The Blues contain so much joy and sadness at the same time.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

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

It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

I never really thought about becoming a professional musician.

Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

A great song can pull me out of a slump and lighten my heart.

After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that’s how I ended up just being a saxophone player.