Music Quotes - Page 53

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

If they think they are doing something new, they ought to do what I do every day - spend at least two hours every day listening to Johann Sebastian Bach and, man, it's all there. If they want to improvise around a theme,which is the essence of jazz, they should learn from the master. He never wastes a note, and he knows where every note is going and when to bring it back. Some of these cats go way out and forget where they began or what they started to do. Bach will clear it up for them.

I believe that regardless of how many people you've listened to or emulated over the years, your sound is you and what you really feel inside.

My music is evidence of my souls will to live.

Good music is good music and that should be enough for anybody.

I too once belived in the heavier gauge string as a superior tone source. However, thanks to the graciousness of B.B. King I learned that a lighter-gauge string offers superior playing comfort ... try it, you may like it.

To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal. You require absolute control and professionalism.

A song ain't nothing but a conversation fixed up to where you can talk it over and over without getting tired of it.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation - what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.

Got my Allman Brothers cassettes stacked up on the dash, got some Jack back in the trunk and a tank full of gas.

It's emotional blackmail to say if you're a good businesswoman and a musician, you're betraying your music.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

There's no religion but sex and music.

Music is the only thing in this world, with the exception of sneezing and looking at the sunset, that takes you to a place that's above the mundane. Everything else is just bullshit.

If you elect a matinee idol mayor, you're going to have a musical comedy administration.

To me, art is the capacity to experience one's innocence: craft is how you get to that point. Maturity in a musician would be the point at which one is innocent at will. At that point the relationship between music and the musician is direct and reliable. The relationship with music is always mysterious: when it works, you can never tell. You can never guarantee when it's going to work. You can only to put yourself in a place where it's more likely to happen.

Music is a defining element of character.

Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?

The qualities in music which I considered most important - and still do - were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity.

Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity.

I'm not a poet. I'm not up onstage to get something off my chest. I'm making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people to figure out, and I'm not going to get in the way of that.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.

There was always a lot of American music in England until, obviously when the Beatles came around, then there was a shift towards English music, but before then American music was the main thing...