Keith Jarrett Quotes

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 don't always have to be on what is the newest in music is. I'm slowly educating myself in music. For me, I feel more free in not knowing everything in what I'm doing. You can start making up too many rules for yourself. It should just be love and fun and feeling good.

When I play a solo I'm just expressing that moment. It can go horribly wrong easily enough.

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

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

Any talk of 'craft' makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it's like the first time. There's no craft in that.

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.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

When you're playing the same dirty dozen night after night, the moments that keep it fresh are those when you just let go and trust everyone.

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.

You never know what's going to happen next onstage.

I love to improvise when it's appropriate and encouraged by a producer.

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.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.

I look at my clarinet sometimes and I think, I wonder what's going to come out of there tonight? You never know.

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

I'm open to making any kind of music, or maybe making no music ever again. That's also an option, always. Who knows what'll happen.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

My thing is whatever comes at me, I'm there. But DJ-ing and music is my passion... I'm going to be unpredictable.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

Many times you never know what's going to happen. You'll play songs that you never thought you were going to play.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

You have to react to what's around you in the moment, whatever the music is. Just think of it as some place you have to enter and you need to find the key.