“Perhaps the valediction for the European quartet should be left to Jan Garbarek: “People ask me very often what it was to play with Keith. There’s really only one way to answer: every minute I was there on stage with him, it was absolutely fantastic! There was not one single concert or even rehearsal where he didn’t play something that blew my mind away. It’s amazing – I could just stand there listening to him on stage. Unfortunately, I had to play sometimes! … and I loved that trio with Keith and Palle and Jon… it was too much sometimes. They could do all these lovely things together – I didn’t want to breal into that! It sounded so good! Jon is fantastic 0 a very natural player. It was just wonderful, the whole experience for me!”
“Jan Garbarek about Keith Jarrett:“What people don’t consider is all his wonderful ways of accompanying his own melodies. That is only that version. But I’ve played with him so many nights and they were all different!... The way he voiced things and the inner lines he played behind the melody, and his own compositions were often radically different, but no less beautiful… It’s hard to believe!”
“I know his death could have been avoided with a doctor who was really on top of it. He had so much life in him. It was wrong. I played my way through that first show and did "Old Man" for Ben (Keith) at the end. I looked over to my right and he was out there somewhere, but not next to me anymore.”
“… there’s one thing that I know well – that I feel very alone. It’s the price you have to pay if you want to be yourself. And don’t believe that I don’t suffer for it, but it seems to me that I have nothing to say to the majority of people and it’s perhaps that which makes me feel timid… I'm very demonstrative when I play. I always make faces, laugh, jump about, gesticulate, and am very animated, and many people who see me like that think that I’m much more reserved when I’ve left my piano. In reality, I feel truly at ease only in music…Keith Jarrett”
“It often felt like God had merely let me into a foyer where I could hear others playing my note in another room, with no way to get to the music. And that's really what I wanted to do. I wanted to play my note. I wanted to do the thing that made me feel alive.”
“I was recalling that other world in which it had thrilled me, in a way, the surprise of thinking that I could be a person who would betray Daniel. Now I wondered if Daniel could surprise himself, could surprise me, by being such a person too. Would he let himself do such a thing? I didn’t think so. And then I wondered: Is it by will, then, that we are who we are? Do we decide, do we make ourselves, after a certain point in life?I tried to call up the moment when I had decided I could be such a person. It seemed to me I hadn’t quite got there, not really. That I was still just playing with the idea of it when the ground shifted under me. But perhaps to play with such an idea was already to be a certain kind of person.”