Keith Jarrett

When you’re on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn’t exactly a sound – it’s a hum, like the streets.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it’s not etched in your system.

One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.

We really never know what we’re gonna play when we get on stage.

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

If music is sound and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

The sound of the orchestra is one of the most magnificent musical sounds that has ever existed.

Jazz improvisation is the art of collective negotiated expression.

Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

The other day I came across a recording I made of a night at my apartment when I was living with Kris Kristofferson. Bob Dylan had been around earlier and we were all passing around the guitar. Whenever it came to my turn I would run into the kitchen and say I’d left the coffee on the stove or something. Shyness. Scared to perform.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

Jazz music today is from the head and not the heart.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

The qualities in music I consider most important are beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination and sincerity.

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

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

The value of music is not dazzling yourself and others with technique.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.