Melody Gardot

Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

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.

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.

Why Jazz? This is just the way I see music.

In a way, I started out to be a baritone player.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

Miles Davis and John Coltrane were so cool, if alive today global warming wouldn’t be an issue.

Start well and end well. The middle will look after itself.

Writing is allowing the musical idea to speak for itself.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

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.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

I’m not playing for other musicians. We’re trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We’ll keep him happy.

I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.

I developed in my head that I’m never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it’s like an audition each time. You get nervous just before going onstage. I still have that, but I think it’s more like concern. You’re concerned about the people – like meeting your in-laws for the first time.

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing and instrumental personality.

Life is too full of distractions nowadays. When I was a kid we had a little Emerson radio and that was it. We were more dedicated. We didn’t have a choice.

I have to be a star like another man has to breathe.

I think you have to leave a lot to the imagination!