Transcript of conversation with Ron Carter

Ron Carter: When I’m playing a classical piece, I’m playing with somebody else's ideas and the history of classical music is, you keep playing this person's point of view until you get tired of it. In a jazz performance, whoever the composer is, alive or dead, he's written this piece for people to experiment with. Maybe they want to change the form. Maybe they want to change the changes. Maybe they want to change the tempo, maybe the key. But it's written with these kinds of options in mind. So the feeling of playing the Beethoven 5th is not the same as playing All Blues. It can't be.