Melody Gardot

After the accident, I had to reconstruct myself completely. I was taught to see again and to hear with hearing aids. My body had to be completely reprogrammed. And music therapy was at the core of the healing process.

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.

Music activates the brain at a high level.

Music is the most fantastic drug there is!

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.

I still do what I love, and I don’t really think about it. I try to make a beautiful show, so people go home happy. That’s my biggest aspiration: to make people happy.

All the music that was ever heard came from the inner silence in every musician.

[on Glastonbury] I started off the show and I completely messed up the music. And me, as you can imagine by this phone call, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. So it really put me into a slightly depressed state.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

Play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing even if it does take them 15, 20 years.

[on Django Reinhardt] This was a man who changed my musical life by giving me a whole new perspective on the guitar and, on an even more profound level, on my relationship with sound…During my formative years, as I listened to Django’s records, especially songs like ‘Nuages’ that I would play for the rest of my life, I studied his technique. Even more, I studied his gentleness. I love the human sound he gave his acoustic guitar.

It became a kind of a game, to remember the things that had happened five minutes ago. I would start making notes about the things I was doing, on an instrument that was foreign to me, the guitar, so it was just a fun way of doing cognitive therapy. I was none the wiser to it until I began to improve and my ability to speak began to come back.

I cringed when I heard myself described as a Jazz singer. I’ve always thought of myself as a Jazz vocalist.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.

Silence is what makes music sexy. I just move blocks of silence around. The notes are an afterthought.

I came from an era when we didn’t use electronic instruments. The bass wasn’t even amplified. The sound was the sound you got.

[In 1969] I think lyrics have always been important to any serious writer of music.

Every time I see a musician – it doesn’t matter what age – that inspires me, there’s always a secret little wish that maybe we’ll play together, because that’s how I learn and grow and so forth, you know. But hopefully there’s a lot more.

The trio is the biggest sound you can have with the smallest unit.

My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being.