Marilyn Crispell

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

Men have died for this music. You can’t get more serious than that.

Music is my mistress and she plays second fiddle to no one.

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

Black and white players hadn’t appeared together in public before Teddy Wilson and I began working with B.G.

Sometimes there are no gigs, but the main thing is still the music.

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room – proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.

It’s not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.

As long as you’ve got your horn in your mouth, you’re developing.

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.

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 gave it my absolute everything I had in that howl at the start of the song. And then B. B. King opened up his mouth and I felt like a girl. We had learned and absorbed, but the more we tried to be like B.B., the less convincing we were.

I love Jazz because it has the perfect balance of discipline and freedom.

I would’ve loved to have been in a band, but sadly I just wasn’t good enough.

I’ve always liked the Freddie King/B. B. King rich tone, and at the same time, I like the manic Buddy Guy/Otis Rush Strat tone. So I’m always caught in the middle of the Gibson and Fender sounds. If I’m playing my black [Fender] Strat, and I’m in the middle of a blues, I kind of wish I was playing a [Gibson] Les Paul. Then again, if I was playing a Les Paul, the sound would be great, but I’d be saying, “Man, I wish I had the Stratocaster neck!”