Quotes from Pat Metheny

I don't know if I would qualify as mainstream. I think I have managed to function pretty successfully on the fringes of the music world and have been able to play exactly what I have wanted the way I have wanted.

If you come to my house, you won't see a wall of trophies or things like that. I'm sort of 'on to the next thing' all the time.

I hate the way chorus boxes sound.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

Jazz is an idea that is more powerful than the details of its history.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.

The more I can learn about music, the more I learn about other things.

I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.

Music is one big thing to me.

The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence.

It is Jazz's very nature to change, to develop & adapt to the circumstances of its environment.

One very fundamental thing has not changed and I realized that it will never change... is that I really need to go home and practice.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

I can't really say enough about Chris Potter. He is one of the greatest musicians I have ever known, and every second I have been on the band stand with him has been an absolute pleasure.

I didn't want there to be a computer on stage. When I see people with computers on stage, I think, 'Are you sending e-mail?' That's so corny.

The pianist Cecil Taylor is extremely melodic; the guitarist Derek Bailey is extremely melodic, and Ornette Coleman.

The main thing in my life...is that I really need to go home and practice.

The reality of music itself, which is the fabric of life for me, is where most of my attention is.

...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

No two notes are ever the same volume. With the guitar, you really have to model in your mind this wider thing; you're trying to create the illusion of a bigger dynamic range.