Oscar Peterson

It’s the group sound that’s important, even when you’re playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

I have no one style.

If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.

You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.

A musician’s responsibility is to get as much of his art across to the public as possible.

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.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

I sing like I feel.

I have music inside me and I’m very lucky to be able to play music and that’s the way that I try to do it.

We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we’ve forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We’ve separated music from life.

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

I am only a mixture of countless influences and thanks to that I am able to find my own style of playing.

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.

I’m an experimenter. It’s rich because every album I’ve done, except for a couple of techno-y records, are different. Really you’ve got to hand it to the Fender Strat, because there are songs in that guitar. It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time because it’s forever sitting there challenging you to find something else in it, but it is there if you really search.

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.

It’s Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, you know. They got a musical mind together and uh, you can’t explain it.

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

Music is what I hear and something that I live by.