Melody Gardot

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

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.

Baby I’m a fool who thinks it’s cool to fall in love!

For me an album cover is like a movie poster. I wanted an image that was pure femininity, which could please a sculptor. I went through a lot of suffering. But managing to stand up nude on stage carrying a guitar is a victory.

It’s the same for listeners. If you can’t stand your girlfriend, can’t take it anymore, put on your headphones and escape into another world.

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.

If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’.

Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I’m concerned with retaining that process.

When the music changes, so does the dance.

New artists can own their content and completely build their base and their following without having to sell or be owned by anybody and it creates such a diversity.

I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.

I haven’t got a great jazz band and I don’t want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat’s among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It’s all in what you define as ‘real jazz.’ It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

Sound is the first thing that we tune into.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art, instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

Those who were seen dancing were thought insane by those who could not hear the music.

If my own work had more importance than any others, it’s because the piano is the key instrument in music.

There’s millions and millions of people who think Les Paul is a guitar!

I can’t sing it straight. I have no choice but to swing it.

I’ve had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I’ve had lots of guys call me up. I’ve gotten two or three commissions to write things. I’ve written lots of movie scores.