Melody Gardot

The first time I went to Paris, it just felt like I was home. I didn’t question it.

The first jazz I heard was Duke Ellington. I was learning to play classical music, but my teacher swapped out those lessons for jazz lessons because I had started adding grace notes to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

I think that age is irrelevant. We’re all pretty much spiritual beings – I consider myself to be about eighty-five. I feel like I’m ancient, like two thousand years old.

The honest truth is that every day was new, every day was a challenge, every day was starting from a fresh place, and as time went on, over the course of about two years, things became better and better. But I don’t think that there was for me anything like, ‘Ah, this is taking too long’, because ‘long’ didn’t exist. So I see it as a blessing. I have to laugh. I mean there’s no other way to look at it.

After the accident, I had to reconstruct myself completely. I was taught to see again and to hear with hearing aids. My body had to be completely reprogrammed. And music therapy was at the core of the healing process.

When you make a sound, it carries on to infinity. Sound is a vibration. Vibration is energy. All of that survives in space long after we’re dead. When I walk on stage at the Wiener Staatsoper, I can feel the footsteps of Chopin and Rachmaninov.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn’t scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn’t mine – it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

Musicians tell me, if what I’m doing is right, they should never have gone to school.

You can be beyond yourself, better than your technique, better than most of your usual ideas.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night, but differently each time.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead

Writing is allowing the musical idea to speak for itself.

Darlin… be-bop is the music of the future.

This be an empty world without the blues.

How do you explain what it feels like to get on the stage and make poetry that you know sinks into the hearts and souls of people who are unable to express it.

All I wanted was to be big, to be in show business and to travel… and that’s what I’ve been doing all my life.

Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

It’s spontaneity that has always characterized Jazz music’s finest improvisers.

If you’ve only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.