Keith Jarrett Quotes

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.

The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz ... you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.

I think you have to be completely merciless with yourself.

When I joined the band I didn't know any of the tunes, and when I left the band I didn't know any of the tunes!

Creativity is what makes humanity move. We were created to participate.

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

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

I believe that a truly valuable artist must be an artist who realizes the impossibility of his task -and then continues to do it.

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

If sound is music and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound. If the sound is effective, it should actually have a chemical - some sort of physiological - effect on the listener, so he doesn't have to hear that sound again.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

If music is sound & came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound.

I'm my own most merciless critic onstage.

I've never heard anything Wynton [Marsalis] played sound like it meant anything at all. Wynton has no voice and no presence. His music sounds like a talented high-school trumpet player to me ... he's jazzy the same way someone who drives a BMW is sporty.

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.

I am a romantic, I admit it.

It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. We need to hear the process of the musician working on himself. We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers. Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many ways, we're sorry about.