Music Quotes - Page 40

Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir.

Don't be afraid, just play the music.

I feel quite sad for the young musicians coming up because they may never get to pay their rent properly. It doesn't matter what the genre; nowadays, it's so much harder than it ever was.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

...I got a call from a record company offering me a contract, I did not want to take it because the Lord had pointed me in the direction of spiritual activity...And then it was disclosed to me that I could do both spiritual and musical work. So for five years I executed that contract, and when it was finished, after I made the album Transfiguration, I didn't make another album until twenty-six years later. This new album, Translinear Light, came out of the pleading and constant appealing from my son Ravi Coltrane: 'Ma, please make a CD.' So I eventually agreed.

It was so interesting, when [John Coltrane] created A Love Supreme. He had meditated that week. I almost didn't see him downstairs. And it was so quiet! There was no sound, no practice! He was up there meditating, and when he came down he said, "I have a whole new music!" He said, "There is a new recording that I will do, I have it all, everything." And it was so beautiful! He was like Moses coming down from the mountain. And when he recorded it, he knew everything, everything. He said this was the first time that he had all the music in his head at once to record.

To play great music, you must keep your eyes on a distant star.

It's rare that I ever meet a musician who doesn't agree that music is a language. But it's very rare to meet a musician that really treats it like one.

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.

The language of tones belongs equally to all mankind, and melody is the absolute language in which the musician speaks to every heart.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

If you pour some music on whatever's wrong, it'll sure help out.

.. the guitar is just a wonderful instrument. It's everything: a bartender, a psychiatrist, a housewife. It's everything, but it's elusive

A painter's got a canvas. The writer's got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.

I have a problem with capitalism, in it's extreme sense. At the same time communism, I have a problem with that, because every man must feel like a lord in his own manor.

Music is the thousandth of a millisecond between one note and another; how you get from one to the other-that's where the music is.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.

They're not particular whether you're playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.