Keith Jarrett

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.

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

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

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

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

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

Early on, I figured out that when the top of a guitar is vibrating and a string is vibrating, you’ve got a conflict. One of them has got to stop, and it can’t be the string, because that’s making the sound. So in 1934, I asked the Larson Brothers—Chicago instrument makers—to build me a guitar with a half-inch-thick maple top and no f-holes. They thought I was crazy.

Get out there and improvise and take chances and don’t be a perfectionist.

I like to know for whom I’m writing – it makes the composition easier to do.

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

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

Even now, at 82 years old, if I don’t learn something every day, you know what I think? It’s a day lost. Now, I don’t practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I’m doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear.

That’s the beauty of music. They can’t take it from you.

I kinda went back to that period between ’88 and ’94 where I felt like I was the most creative, without being hindered by powers that be. I was no longer going to try to hinder myself to what I thought was going to be on the radio.

It is people’s hearts that move the age.

Let your life be your music and let your music be your life.

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. Some of it comes from books.

If you’re trying to be hip, be hip!

I don’t have to lay on the couch and see a therapist because my therapy is in art.