Keith Jarrett

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

Once we’re inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

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

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.

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

The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

Music is a reservoir… of sounds.

I have a lot of albums yet to do.

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

Jazz music is the power of now.

If I can’t feel it, I don’t want to sing it.

I was a nerd academically. But I was also an athlete and a musician. I never wanted to be shut out of any situation. I think it was that more than anything.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.

Your horn is your passport to the world.

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!

You only get better by playing.

I’ve never recorded anything I didn’t like.

Jazz musician is a combination entertainer, poet, singer, educator, student, artist, seducer and all-round good fellow.

In order to be honest with myself, I have to reveal more of who I am. This is a part of the improv process.