Keith Jarrett

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

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

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.

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

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

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

If T-Bone Walker had been a woman, I would have asked him to marry me. I’d never heard anything like that before: single-string blues played on an electric guitar.

There’s nobody plays like me and I don’t play like anybody else.

People don’t want to suffer. They want to sound good immediately and this is one of the biggest problems.

We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity.

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.

On my album Here, that’s the first time that I’ve really understood how I could put all the things that were happening in the world and in my life and in our lives as just human beings into one body that was just so powerful and really had a perspective. That was an opening for me and I think that naturally, there is just so much to talk about. I don’t see me getting quiet anytime soon.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

Blues is to Jazz what yeast is to bread; without it, it’s flat.

It’s always been a gift with me, hearing music the way I do. I don’t know where it comes from, it’s just there and I don’t question it.

Music is a reservoir… of sounds.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself.

To this day, I don’t like people walking on stage not looking good. You have to look good. If you feel special about yourself then you’re going to play special.

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.