Jeff Beck

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?

When Jazz broke through in England, I remember sneaking to listen on the radio much to my parent’s disapproval.

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’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.

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 love it when people hear my music but can’t figure out what instrument I’m playing.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

I have a sense of the importance of music and how powerful it is to bring people together.

Don’t threaten me with love, baby. Let’s just go walking in the rain.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

By giving the public a rich and full melody, distinctly arranged and well played, all the time creating new tone colors and patterns, I feel we have a better chance of being successful. I want a kick to my band, but I don’t want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

[on Prince] I learned about music that didn’t have any barriers or any kind of, like, containment. I learned about wild, crazy topics and ways to express yourself that had never been written in quite that way before. I learned that a human being could be able to defy all stereotypes, and be the epitome of badassness.

We usually never got out of there before four or five o’clock in the morning. Every morning. So it was rough.

I’ve tried all my life to avoid copying. If I can’t be myself, there’s no point being in Jazz.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

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.

The weird thing about bass is the simplest stuff to do is the hardest.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.