John McLaughlin

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

You can have the greatest player in terms of mastering an instrument and be yawning your head off.

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

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

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.

My singing evolved with a feeling of intense relaxation, always using my diaphram and breathing specifically through my nose.

I let my body play what’s in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived.

Music has to be accessible.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.

First I was working on classical music that didn’t move me at all. I hated it. So I decided to discover the kinds of classical music that did move me—like Chopin, Satie, Beethoven, and certain Mozart songs. Mozart would play a counterpart with his left hand while using his right to mock it. It was blue, dark, shadowy and it made me feel something. That’s when I realized music was inside me.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.

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.

There’s a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.

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

If I have to go around telling everyone how great I am, then there’s something wrong with my act.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

Stop before you’re done.

I went through a struggle, and I really needed to get myself together and connect with my purpose, which is music.