Rand Lines

“I have no problem with an art form being elitist,” he said when asked if it bothers him that jazz has turned from folk music into an “elitist” type of music. “There is so much noise today that being able to discern what is beautiful requires a lot of effort. Few people will go to the trouble to do that. Few will have the curiosity. But jazz is not elitist – it is marginalized and ignored. All those musicians struggling to pay their bills would not describe it as elitist.”

— Brad Mehldau

“I’m never trying to get it to sound just like a piano. I’m trying to find every possible way to make it either a voice or an instrument that is unlike a Western instrument. You know, it can’t be a guitar but I wish it was; it can’t be an orchestra but I wish it was. So the rebellion that I’m faced with immediately upon sitting down at a piano is that it is a piano. And I can turn cartwheels — it’s not going to make any difference. But what I can do is try to almost fool the instrument into becoming something else.”

— Keith Jarrett, WSJ January 2009