Keith Jarrett

If I’m not a jazz player all the time, I’ve at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

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.

One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.

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

I don’t like recording studios – except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

I did go through a trial-and-error period where I tried out lots of different guitars, but within a couple of years I was right back to the Les Paul. From that point it’s stayed with me ever since. I have other guitars—and I love a lot of them—but I’m most at home on a Les Paul. It’s interesting: most of the time I would even rather make a Les Paul do the things those other guitars do. From the get-go, the Les Paul spoke to me.

I got out of the car and there was a knife in my neck. The guy says, “Don’t move.” And the drummer got out of the car, and he got a gun in his head. This was my entrance to the South Side of Chicago. But it was necessary, because I wanted to play jazz.

I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

There’s only one bass player in a band. I’m the best bass player of any band I’m in.

Pop doesn’t really look back. It can’t. What makes pop work is simplicity.

For years the trio did nothing but play for musicians and other hip people. We starved.

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

If the audience doesn’t hear what is going on, is it going on?

Learn the tunes by playing the masters, learn expression by playing yourself.

Music chooses her musicians.

People all over the world have problems. And as long as people have problems, the blues can never die.

I always had a deep feeling to be one with the very minute I’m in.