Jeff Beck

My Strat is another arm, it’s part of me. It doesn’t feel like a guitar at all. It’s an implement which is my voice.

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever.

[on Django Reinhardt] By far the most astonishing guitar player ever … Django was quite superhuman, there’s nothing normal about him as a person or a player

A Les Paul, which is kind of a sissy guitar compared to a Strat anyway. The Les Paul is heavier, but because of that bulk you can do bends on it more easily. Also, the Les Paul’s lack of a vibrato arm means you’re not wrestling against the spring-loaded bridge all the time. The Strat is the ultimate because it’s like having a miniature pedal steel within it. Once you get familiar with it where the bends are and where they meld down into a fourth or whatever, you can do all kinds of pedal-steel-like things, which I think are cool..

A Les Paul feels like a guitar and I play differently on that and I sound too much like someone else.

I love it when people hear my music but can’t figure out what instrument I’m playing.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

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

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there’s no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

To the person who uses music as a medium for the expression of ideas, feelings, images, or what have you; anything which facilitates this expression is properly his instrument.

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.

It’s all music.

I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.

90%, 100% are going there to hear the singing. The story is another thing. Nobody’s interested in the story. Happiness is happiness.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, now heaven knows, anything goes.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.

Actually, I think the more Ben [Taylor] sings, the less like James he sounds.