John McLaughlin

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

Music is born out of the inner sounds within a soul.

It’s not what you do, but the way you’re doing it and in the end that’s all that we have.

All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician.

Indian music is very soulful and the only other school that develops improv to the high degree you find in Jazz.

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.

Jazz has evolved with an inner necessity characteristic of any true art form.

When I started playing, I was playing just the harmonica. We’re back in the prohibition days. Like down a dark alley somewhere, you’d play for an illegal club that was probably right behind a police station, and what I’d do is sing and play the harmonica. It didn’t take me long to work out that I needed something more, and that was the guitar. So when you added the guitar, the harmonica and my voice, you would be talking with people mainly in the bar, or in the restaurant, or the people in the pub.

Surrender your whole being to a note and gravity disappears.

As long as musicians have passion for spontaneity and creating something that’s never been before, Jazz will flourish.

All this is saying is, OK I see now, the ‘hood does not quite want Shirley Bassey yet, so let me still give them this. Crack Music was made after Diamonds. After black people were like, ‘I don’t know about this one.’ It was like me reaching too high for the cookie jar.

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

Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.

Keeping your artistic self as creative as possible is a balancing act.

It’s either hip or it ain’t.

Man, all music is folk music. You ain’t never heard no horse sing a song, have you?

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.