Katie Greenwood

Music doesn’t have to hop to be hip, as long as it swings it sings.

The trio is the biggest sound you can have with the smallest unit.

The high note is not the only thing.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it’s like the human voice

So much of Jazz doesn’t have an audience other than music students or musicians.

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.

Inspiration grows into full-scale creation through persistence and imagination.

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about Jazz and Blues.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

When I decided that I wanted to be a Jazz musician, I knew that it was about improvising.

Of course, there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

Even when you write it, someone’s got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you’re still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I’m really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

I met up with George Shearing about a year before my mother passed away. When I was 11 years old, Mama took me to the Edgewater Inn in Seattle and I was able to sit down and play piano for George and a lot of (the set list) was songs I had heard from the album, ‘Concerto For My Love.’ Then, after Mama died, my dad and I went to actually hear him perform at the Edgewater Inn when I was 12. Oh my gosh! It just really got me into playing piano.