Pat Metheny Quotes

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.

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

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

I never studied jazz technically; I just know and love the music.

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

My father is a jazz musician, so I grew up hearing jazz. My parents loved it, but I didn't like it. It went on for too long. Yes, I had certain teachers that really inspired me, like Danny Barker, and John Longo. And I had no idea that I would have any impact on jazz.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I've met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they're all funny.

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'