Aaron Diehl Quotes

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

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.

I'm a classically trained jazz pianist - I've been playing since I was 3 years old.

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.

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.

If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

In essence, I feel I'm more jazz guitar player because I write vehicles geared for improvisation.

I went to jazz school. Not to say I'm a great jazz musician, but I studied under some great teachers. It was an important part of my life.

Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

I was always very leery of my piano playing. As a young kid, I wanted to be a jazz musician, but my taste was far greater than my ability.

One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.

A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.

Jazz was more of a tool for me to use to enhance my musicality.

You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

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

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.

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

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

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.

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

One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.