John Abercrombie

If you listen to a lot of music, it gradually seeps into your consciousness or your unconsciousness and comes out in your music.

On record dates like that I never felt too nervous because everything was really overdubbed. When we did that album, we were in the studio for probably a week, so you had a lot of opportunity to fix things.

Classical musicians do this all the time. They want perfection. So they piece things together. Eight bars of this and six bars of that. Glenn Gould said that with a recording he wanted to make perfect versions of pieces.

You’re just sort of searching for this “thing” and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don’t. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you’re improvising, at least the way I play, I’m trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

I don’t remember what was going through my mind, but what was going through my body was fear and terror. I had been on the road with Johnny and working gigs and playing a lot of the organ clubs.

Every time I listen back to solos of mine I’ll hear something I like and then another phrase that I can’t stand. You have to live with what you play. And the recording medium puts that on us. When I play live gigs I don’t think so much like that.