The bass, no matter what kind of music you're playing, it just enhances the sound and makes everything sound more beautiful and full. When the bass stops, the bottom kind of drops out of everything.
If you strive to become a good human being with the qualities of generosity, humility and having reverence for life...just maybe you'll become a great musician.
As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something thats never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.
You have to see your unimportance before you can see your importance and your significance to the world.
I learned at a very young age that music teaches you about life. When you're in the midst of improvisation, there is no yesterday and no tomorrow — there is just the moment that you are in. In that beautiful moment, you experience your true insignificance to the rest of the universe. It is then, and only then, that you can experience your true significance.
I think life is really hard sometimes. It's not easy to wake up every day and go through what you go through. But the beautiful moments that you share with people that you love, or even experience alone, are worth all of the pain and sorrow. Those moments should be cherished, and I think that's what music is all about-to remind people of the beautiful moments that are in everybody's life
I think it’s very important to live in the present. One of the great things that improvising teaches you is the magic of the moment that you’re in … because when you improvise you’re in right now. You’re not in yesterday or tomorrow—you’re right in the moment. Being in that moment really gives you a perspective of life that you never get at any other time as far as learning about your ego… You have to see your unimportance before you can see your importance and your significance to the world.
In the midst of creating, a person is raised to another level of consciousness that doesn't have that much to do with everyday thinking. It's as if you could imagine life before there were words.
Creative Arts raise a person to another level of consciousness as if you could imagine life before words.
I just try to play music from my heart and bring as much beauty as I can to as many people as I can. Just give them other alternatives, especially people who arent exposed to creative music.
The artist is very lucky, because in an art form that's spontaneous like jazz, that's when you really see your true self. And that's why, when I put down my instrument, that's when the challenge starts, because to learn how to be that kind of human being at that level that you are when you're playing - that's the key, that's the hard part.
Before music there was silence and the duet format allows you to build from the silence in a very special way.
I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them.
In the midst of creating, a person is raised to another level of consciousness.
I told my students the other day in class, which is about the spirituality and creativity as much as it is about music. I said, 'If you're walking down the street and you see a baby carriage, and there's a baby in the carriage; you look down and your eyes meet the eyes of the baby. The baby looks at you: That's the kind of moment you're in when you're playing.
I just see myself as a human being that's concerned about life.
I always felt that I was born in the wrong era. I wanted to be friends with John Garfield, for instance. He was one of the only actors that refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee back when the Hollywood Ten blacklist was happening in the McCarthy period. I wish I could've been friends with Charlie Parker and played with him. That's my period. I feel real close to the '40s - and actually I was born in '37, so I was a kid singing on the radio in the '40s. But I always dreamed of going to big cities.
The whole underlying theme for the new music... is to communicate honest, human values, and in doing that to try to improve the quality of life.
Chris (Anderson) is risking his life with every chord, that's how much it means to him. He has such a reverence for beauty, he plays like an angel.
I always told the people at Cal Arts that if they wanted me to do Jazz studies, first of all, there couldn't be a big band within 500 miles and that I could do what I wanted to do. And they said I could.
I just sit down at the piano and rattle it off.
It used to be that creative music was most of the music that you heard back in the '30s and '40s, and now it's like 3 percent. So, its kind of a struggle getttin' it out there.
I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.
When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.
There's like a special group of people that come from different parts of the planet to study with me. It's nice. I just gave a workshop in Boston at the New England Conservatory, which was really nice.
