Keith Jarrett

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

You can practice to learn technique, but I’m more interested in conceiving something in the moment.

When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved.

You gotta love livin’, baby, ’cause dyin’ is a pain in the ass.

..I wanted to create music that was so different that my mother could tell me from anyone else.

Love is sweeping the country.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales. I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.

Music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.

In order to complete your cycle, a musician needs to write; document what is going through your mind and where you are harmonically, theoretically, historically.

I’m always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

A musician starting out today should get a great teacher and learn all there is to know about the instrument.

For a long time I wasn’t listening to music, to the rock and roll stuff on the radio, because it would cause me to get sweaty–it would bring back memories I didn’t want to know about, or I would get that feeling that I’m not alive ’cause I’m not making it. And if it was good, I hated it ’cause I wasn’t doing it. And if it was bad, I was furious ’cause I could’ve done it better…

Music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

You don’t want to play like B. B. King. You want to be you. So what you do is listen to players you like, and try to “borrow” a little bit from each guy. You don’t try to sound exactly like the other guy, you just add the bits to your vocabulary. It’s like learning to read or write.

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