Pat Metheny

Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

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

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

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

Music does not come to you. You have to come to it and you’ll walk away with something you didn’t have before.

The great jazz instrumentalists taught me how to sing and interpret a song. they showed me how a horn can have as much personality as an actor.

[on B. B. King] Very seldom does he talks about the way he play, man. He always wanna talk about young women. And I fuss at him sometimes, I say, ‘Man I wanna know what did you do here!’

The blues was bleeding the same blood as me. The blues didn’t have to explain the mystery of pain that I felt; it was there in the songs and voices of singers like Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, in the cries of their guitars.

[Ben Taylor] He is an interesting combination of the two of us. His voice box is more like mine but the way his tongue sits in his mouth, and the way he pronounces words, is just like James Taylor.

You get that right tickin’ rhythm, man and its ON!

You can’t explain Jazz to anyone without losing the experience because it’s feeling, not words.

Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.

[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

I didn’t get my music together until I was 40.

I could see the blues was about survival.