“You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.”

Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

If you’re not nervous then you’re not paying attention.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

If you don’t know what to play, play nothing.

When the band plays fast, you play slow; when the band plays slow, you play fast.

In high school I was best in music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn.

In music, silence is more important than sound.

If you’re going to drop behind, you have to keep it there.

My future starts when I wake up every morning.

There are no wrong notes.

When kids don’t learn about their own heritage in school, they just don’t care about school… But you won’t see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it – like, they say “rock”. Because the white singers can’t sound like James Brown, they call him “soul”. They’ve been doing that for years. That’s the prejudice crap.

Jazz musicians are so comfortable. The reason they can’t do what we do is because they’re so comfortable doin’ what they do.

First you imitate, then you innovate.

That’s the way women do. The frown. They want to give you the attitude to approach them back, by giving you a negative vibe.

Anyone who’s got a guitar, you like to pick it up. I can play a couple of songs, some ’50s rock and roll, a bit of Elvis. That’s it, really – I’m not a musician, I’m not a singer.

As a musician, my job is incredibly easy, and it’s a good one, but I’ve got to work at it occasionally.

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

I think it was that we were really seasoned musicians. We had serious roots that spanned different cultures, obviously the blues.

Nature is an aeolian harp, a musical instrument whose tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us.

I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It’s not like I’m cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.

I grew up on a lot of early Beatles, DC5, Cream, Clapton, Page, Beck and Hendrix.