Jonny Greenwood Quotes

I've always done very 'composed' music and worked-out solos. But sometimes it's fun not knowing where you're going.

What I love about jazz is the improvisation, the fact that you never know what's going to happen next.

I didn't know how to play lead guitar. There was a freedom in not knowing how to do it.

I personally don't lock in a performance, because I do leave room for things to happen, so I just make sure I'm very intimate with what I'm saying and why I'm saying it so that no matter what happens, we can do whatever we want to do and leave space for play.

In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.

Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

What I always try to do is to respond to the song; I've always rebelled against theory.

Improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing. That's a kind of paradoxical thing about improvising.

With Zeppelin, I tried to play something different every night in my solos. I'd play for 20 minutes but the longest ever was 30 minutes. It's a long time, but whenI was playing it seemed to fly by.

See, there were certain rules I'd always used, and people like Trane, they would break those rules.

Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

There were no rules, other than that the song should sound good and be fun to play.

When I start playing I'm just a rollercoaster of sound. I don't know what's coming next, I never do, and I sit and sign and talk to the people afterwards.

The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.

I think that's what I love about jazz is that you can do what you want, and you're allowed to mess up.

The rule is to try and never play the same thing twice when you have the freedom to do that in the song.

If you're always playing the correct notes, there's something wrong - you're not searching; you're not reaching for anything.

My music is written with one goal in mind: to improvise. It's like explaining a great story in words, but without words, much faster than you could with words. It's like a direct line of instantaneous communication where you don't have to wait for the end.

What makes jazz different is that you can't predict it, it's all about freedom. Just when you think you know what you're going to hear there'll be a left turn, a jazz musician will change it up.

The musicians in the band, and myself as a performer, love the risks of the unpredictable and the feeling of jumping off cliffs musically.

I loved the freedom of improvised music.

If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.