I've been very lucky in my life.
The music has generated all the techniques I use.
Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.
True Music, like all true Art, is an experience to be shared, not judged, for praise cannot make it better, as blame cannot make it worse
The music has generated all the techniques I use. When I sit down to learn to play something. . . it is not because I want to master a technique. It is because I want to hear what an idea sounds like.
As an improviser you need to experience the moment- and that includes everything in the moment. Observe the people around you-the bandleader, the bartender-what they wear, how they deal with people, the simple continuity of their presence. As you do that you'll see how you affect them , and you'll play and act accordingly. You need to study the reality of the moment, and that is very rarely about studying modes and intervals.
The guitar is of no great importance to me. The people it brings to me are what matter. They are what I'm extremely grateful for, because they are alive. The guitar is just an apparatus.
The genius of human society is in fact the ease with which alliances are formed, broken, and reconstituted, always with strong emotional appeals to rules believed to be absolute.
I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.
Being alive and understanding that and making the decision to acutally live take a lot of courage.
Some days I think she was really miserable, because she cried a lot. In a way, I'd had to steel my heart to her crying. You need to steel yourself to a lot of things when someone in your family is really sick.