Pat Metheny

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

It is Jazz’s very nature to change, to develop and adapt to the circumstances of its environment.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

The beauty of Jazz is that it’s malleable. People address it to suit their own personalities.

I don’t worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom and passion.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don’t think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact. …. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is ’cause I’m changing all the time.

I love to hear the note sing.

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.

The hidden things, the subconscious that lies in the body and lets you know: You feel this, you play this.

Have you ever wondered why young people take to music like fish to water? Maybe it’s because music is fun, plain and simple.

I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

If you listen to Donny Hathaway, he had a lot of jazz elements in the way he sang, … For me, the two styles borrow from each other so much that sometimes it’s hard for me to make a distinction. When you hear Lalah sing the combination, that’s when she really shines – when she’s allowed to dip into her jazz when she wants to and then get soulful and do the R ‘n’ B thing.

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

I don’t know where Jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.