Roberta Gambarini

We change every minute, never the same. If there’s no room to express the changes there can’t be any truthfulness.

Music is the tool to express life – and all that makes a difference.

Only play what you hear. If you don’t hear anything, don’t play anything.

I am a devout musician.

Paint pictures with sound. First, find your white-the deepest, roundest sound you can play on the guitar. Then, find your black-which is the most extreme tonal difference from white you can play. Now, just pick the note where you’ve got white, pick it where you’ve got black, and then find all those colors in between. Get those colors down, and you’ll be able to express almost any emotion on the guitar.?

Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.

You can cage the singer but not the song.

The English pianist Alan Clare was once intrigued with a workman who was carrying out some remodeling inside his house. Clare was playing some recordings, and he began to notice that the workman was whistling along with whatever music he put on – Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, it didn’t seem to matter. Even if he hadn’t heard it before, he had the natural musical ability to follow a melody closely and almost automatically. Clare decided to give him a real test and dug up his recording of Art Tatum doing Tea For Two, with the ground-breaking chord changes Tatum introduced into the tune. The workman never lost a beat nor did he lay out for a bar or two to figure out what was going on. He tracked Tatum flawlessly through all his changes, and when the record ended, he spoke for the first time. He glanced at Clare and with classic English understatement said, ‘Tricky f**ker, ain’t he?’

I like jazz, rock n’ roll, some hip hop – I can’t think of any music I don’t like.

A series of vibrations. What does it matter, the source of the catalyst?

I don’t meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.

If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.

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

Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I’m concerned with retaining that process.

However it goes, I’ll just keep playing. That’s where the basic satisfaction is at.

It’s either hip or it ain’t.