Dave Hickey Quotes

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.

Like Russell, I enjoy the fact that when I'm playing solo, if I want to do something completely spontaneous, I don't have to worry about how I'm going to cue the other musicians, or if it's something that's rehearsed.

When you play with Miles, you are on your own, and then it's you who decides what to contribute.

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

Our approach is more the jazz approach, where you learn to play your instrument as well as you can, develop your craft, and then communicate with each other. That's the focus, not trying to give some message or entertain or have a good light show or whatever.

Jazz has a lot to do with being very present. You know the structure, then you flow through it.

I love playing jazz because I love the freedom you have to improvise. It has given me a feeling in my classical repertoire of creating the atmosphere of the here and now.

I just feel such freedom to do whatever. If a song's seven minutes or ten minutes long, then so be it - it's that long.

So the actual riffing came out of us just sitting there and doing it the way I think some people think we really did it, which is all spontaneously, and it really was.

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.

I like to think that we've got a plan, so let's stick to it. That said, once we've stuck to it, we're allowed as much improvisation as anyone cares to indulge themselves in.

Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.

I think jazz has given me freedom with my voice.

I think there's something really freeing about improv, that it's a collective, creative, in-the-moment piece. That's really exciting and really frustrating, because it's there and gone.

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.

You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

But I just think we've got such a continuity with what we're doing that most people come in and fill in the blanks. And sometimes we leave a lot of blanks to be filled.

We go in and I do my thing, and then we supplement it with whatever we want.

I hardly ever go into the studio with a work complete in my head. It emerges from communal activity.

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

I think there's something really freeing about improv, that it's a collective, creative, in-the-moment piece. That's really exciting and really frustrating, because it's there and gone. There's an amazing interaction with the audience that happens because they are very much another scene partner.

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

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.