I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it.

It's just someone has labelled us as having a different label to do what you do. I find that labels are the worst thing in the world for artistic expression.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

Even when you write it, someone's got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you're still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I'm really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

Jerry Garcia was one of the original American icons. He played naturally and beautifully.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.