“I can tell whether a person can play just by the way he stands.”

[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.

It takes you years to learn how to play like yourself.

It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change.

A painting is music you can see and music is a painting you can hear.

You can’t eat a winner’s plaque.

Bebop didn’t have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn’t even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging – but they weren’t sweet.

If you understood everything I say, you’d be me!

What’s swinging in words? If a guy makes you pat your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don’t have to ask anybody if that’s good music or not. You can always feel it.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

With “We Are The World,” I can’t even eat when I watch that on television. If I’m eatin’ some food, I have to put it down. I feel very strongly about that.

Music is the framework around the silence.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up every morning… Every day I find something creative to do with my life.

I think the greatest sound in the world is the human voice.

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.

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.

Every musician wants to do something which will hold up for a long time, and I guess we did it with ‘Stairway to Heaven.’

People are flowers. Music is water. Musicians are the hose.