Keith Jarrett

I’m my own most merciless critic onstage.

I don’t like recording studios – except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

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

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

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

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

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

I think the idea is now for blacks to write about the history of our music. It’s time for that, because whites have been doing it all the time. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is.

My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

I used my mother’s radio as a PA system. I’d take the telephone, the speaking part, and take those two leads off and lead them into the radio and the sound would come out of the speaker.

Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!

Practice 15 or 20 years and then it comes out spontaneously.

Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going.

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

Jazz is the sound of surprise.

Play the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you play.

Blow your life through your horn.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that it’s almost as if it’s intertwined with society.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.