Keith Jarrett

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.

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

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

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

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

I’ll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I’d never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I’d never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn’t much like it at first.

The blues tells a story in itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing.

Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing very powerful emotions. That’s what draws people towards it.

I’m sure critics have their purpose, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales.

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’m… a rather simple person with a limited talent and perhaps a limited perspective.

A drummer has to be kind-hearted.

I don’t intend to be a performing flea anymore. I was the dreamweaver, but although I’ll be around I don’t intend to be running at 20,000 miles an hour trying to prove myself. I don’t want to die at 40.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

Your ear is the final judge to what sounds right and what sounds wrong.

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.

I’ll keep evolving and put that into my songs.