Paul Kreibich

Jazz music is the real deal.

Jazz music is our original American culture.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

Apparently Jazz is now considered high art and the average person has trouble understanding it.

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

The truth is I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

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.

If you’re making money people don’t think you’re playing Jazz. When you’re not making money they think you’re a great Jazz musician.

You’re just a little too hip for the room. It’s not good to be too hip because two hips make an ass.

Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then you’re allowed to sleep. It’s always in the middle of the night, or you’re half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them…

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

You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling.

I saw a vibraphone for the first time and knew immediately I had found my means of expression.

Even if people don’t understand the language that you’re singing in, they still know good music when they hear it.

I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it’s all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

Nothing is out of the question for me. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light…Then I’m grateful.