Jeff Beck

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

A Les Paul, which is kind of a sissy guitar compared to a Strat anyway. The Les Paul is heavier, but because of that bulk you can do bends on it more easily. Also, the Les Paul’s lack of a vibrato arm means you’re not wrestling against the spring-loaded bridge all the time. The Strat is the ultimate because it’s like having a miniature pedal steel within it. Once you get familiar with it where the bends are and where they meld down into a fourth or whatever, you can do all kinds of pedal-steel-like things, which I think are cool..

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

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.

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

I’m meant to be an artist who can stand on my own. That’s my place; that’s what I’m supposed to do.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Hipness is not a state of mind, it’s a fact of life.

It’s performing without any really set basis for the lines and the content as such emotionally or, specifically, musically. And if you sit down and contemplate what you’re going to do, and take five hours to write five minutes of music, then it’s composed music. Therefore I would put it in the classical or serious, whatever you want to call it, written-music category. So there’s composed music and there’s jazz. And to me anybody that makes music using the process that we are using in Jazz, is playing Jazz.

I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. ‘Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles.

The Blues and Jazz will live forever. So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.

Surrender your whole being to a note and gravity disappears.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

I would like to thank my father who discouraged me from playing the violin at an early age.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write to ultimately be at peace with himself.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.