Paul Kreibich

Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.

Apparently Jazz is now considered high art and the average person has trouble understanding it.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

People who like Jazz feel the depth and soul and intelligence that the music expresses.

The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.

Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. Then I’m grateful.

One of the advantages of growing older is you learn what to leave out.

People who like Jazz feel the depth and soul and intelligence that the music expresses.

My style is to just play. The more “live” you capture your music-the more unthought-out-the more magical it is.

And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.

Everybody ought to have a lower East Side in their life.

The more vulnerable and the more confused the song is, the equal and opposite effect is how I feel after having written it.

If your dreams don’t scare you they’re not big enough!

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio.

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

We all have idols. Play like anyone you care about, but try to be yourself while you’re doing so.

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

I think pop music is one of the few things in the 20th century that have made giant strides in reverse.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.