Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

Musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute.

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

When you're up against an electric band like that, it's like you're on two separate planets.

I'm not talking ideas, or even presentation. It's like in politics: You have to sell something to become an electric player - like your skin or your heart.

We really never know what we're gonna play when we get on stage.

If you already have a piece of music ingrained in your body, why would you not play it?

Once we're inside a tune, we can do anything with it.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

I don't like recording studios - except my own, which is just a little room above the garage.

I actually get a metallic taste in my mouth when I think about electric music.

I am a romantic, I admit it.

I can't even tolerate my own playing on electric keyboards. It's not about the musical ideas - the sound itself is toxic. It's like eating plastic broccoli.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

I realized that improvisers should probably always have time off. But musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute - unless something drastic occurs.

I'm my own most merciless critic onstage.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

If a person plays dissonance long enough, it will sound like consonance. It's a language that was alien and then it's less and less alien as it continues to live.

Music always turns into music. As soon as I play a key, push a key down, there's no theory any more. When I go and I hear a sound on the keyboard, all theories go out the window.

One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.

The way I think about the practicing, it is my undercover work.

We accept so many things that come through the media; we get used to them, however vigilant we are. But for any creative art, you have to remain 110% conscious, and in a world that's losing consciousness, that's getting harder.

When you're on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn't exactly a sound - it's a hum, like the streets.

You know, when people look at a tree, they look at the leaves; they don't look at the spaces between the leaves. They're focused on the tree. I think there's an awareness of spaces or it wouldn't look like a tree to them.

Your own music comes out of your head and emotions, but it's not etched in your system.

When you're on stage you have a very strange knowledge of what the audience is. It isn't exactly a sound - it's a hum, like the streets.

The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.

What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

If one takes all the styles in jazz harmonically from the earliest beginnings to the latest experiments, he still has a rather limited scope when compared to the rest of music in the world.

I don't know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.

I don't like freedom jazz - I think it's void of roots and void of foundation.

Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.

I listened to Billie Holiday a lot in order to learn to sing. She remains one of the extraordinary jazz singers. But my intent is to become my own voice, to be able to interpret these songs in my own way.

I think what we need is a more welcoming mode from the people who put on a hundred million country-western shows on television. How about a monthly jazz show?

Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

I don't want to appear hostile, like I'm hostile to L.A. or that I feel that the people don't appreciate jazz. I don't think it's that. I think it's something more. It's something a little bit more complicated than that.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

My brother had a big band in high school; after that we continued to play together, eventually forming a group called the Jazz Brothers, that recorded for Riverside Records.