The best musicians are not the best players, they're the best listeners.
Listening is the key to everything good in music.
One very fundamental thing has not changed and I realized that it will never change... is that I really need to go home and practice.
Learning to play is mostly about learning to hear, and learning to really listen deeply to sound in a musical way is a lifetime's worth of work.
My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.
Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers.
Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence.
More and more as time has gone on, I realize that playing is really more about listening than it is about playing.
Players get to that intermediate level where they can already play pretty good, and that's kind of a dangerous period because they tend to start playing only the things that they can play, rather than the things they can't.
Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.
I have to admit that more and more lately, the whole idea of jazz as an idiom is one that I've completely rejected. I just don't see it as an idiomatic thing any more...To me, if jazz is anything, it's a process, and maybe a verb, but it's not a thing. It's a form that demands that you bring to it things athat are valuable to you, that are personal to you. That, for me, is a pretty serious distinction that doesn't have anything to do with blues, or swing, or any of these other things that tend to be listed as essentials in order for music to be jazz with a capital J.
People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.
The main thing in my life...is that I really need to go home and practice.
Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how to play.
The more I can learn about music, the more I learn about other things.
It is Jazz's very nature to change, to develop & adapt to the circumstances of its environment.
What I look for in musicians is a sense of infinity
Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.
There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.
I was deep in the zone of practicing almost constantly
Sometimes I try to lose my identity, and I can't get rid of it!
If you plan on continuing a tradition, it might be a good idea to find out just what tradition it is that you intend to continue.
Its more about conception and touch and spirit and soul than whether my hardware was in place.
I try to be prepared for the moment, through understanding, and being warmed up, knowing all about chords and scales, so I don't even have to think and I can get right to what it is I want to say.
If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.
