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.

I don’t do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less. If it sells one, it sells one.

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

Some players get very philosophical and cerebral about Jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

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.

Music activates the brain at a high level.

With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I’m teeming with the drive to write.

Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.

Music’s a good thing, it calm the beast in the man.

I’ve always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn’t have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

I never really thought about becoming a professional musician.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Jazz is a music that allows a person to express his deepest, most personal self.

The radio makes hideous sounds.

One of the problems of people who live with pain is that they spend the whole day thinking about it, and it’s exasperating. But even when I am having a bad moment and I can’t get myself together, I get on stage and for an hour or two the pain becomes super-small. It’s about controlling the mind, telling the pain to step aside. Music does that. It’s the most fantastic drug in the world.

An orchestra can become as familiar and reliable an instrument as a well-known, well-worn piano.

Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line.

Canada has a passive-aggressive culture, with a lot of sarcasm and righteousness. That went with my weird messianic complex. The ego is a fascinating monster. I was taught from a young age that I had to serve, so that turned into me thinking I had to save the planet.

Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that it’s almost as if it’s intertwined with society.