Keith Jarrett quotes:

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Ideally, I'd like to be the eternal novice, for then only the surprises would be endless.

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

Silence is the potential from which music can arise.

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

I'm my own most merciless critic onstage.

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

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.

... 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 am a romantic, I admit it.

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

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

I think you have to be completely merciless with yourself.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Wynton Marsalis is 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.

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

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!