Keith Jarrett

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

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

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

I cannot say what I think is right about Music. I only know the rightness of it.

We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

Spontaneously composed music is a counterpoint that has its own rules based on a natural order and intuitive logic.

You must own it to play it.

I never have any trouble playing anything I can think of. The trouble is thinking of what to play.

I always make it a point to pick songs on which players really shine.

No one remembers who wrote the tune, putting pen to paper in some lonely place. They remember who had the hit.

When you begin to teach Jazz, the most dangerous thing is to teach style.

I am only a mixture of countless influences and thanks to that I am able to find my own style of playing.

Only play what you hear. If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

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

I was walking down the street, and I saw a sewer digger on his lunch hour open his lunch pail, dig out a harmonica, knock out the cracker crumbs, and play a bunch of tunes on it. I was fascinated by that harmonica, so I stared the guy out of it. I just stared at him. He said, ‘Here, kid, take it. Get out of here.’

I don’t believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.

Blues purists never cared for me. I don’t worry about it. I think if it this way: When I made ‘Three O’ Clock Blues,’ they were not there. The people out there made the tune. And blues purists just wrote about it. The people is who I’m trying to satisfy.

Jazz is a music that allows a person to express his deepest, most personal self.

Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I’m using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I’m happy with that.