Music Quotes - Page 56

Ideally the point of music is community, not the player. Musicians are simply channels to link the audience to the music and to each other.

Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.

There won't ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that's fine with me because that industry didn't operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.

The thing is this: When I play, what I try to do is to reach my subconscious level. I don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at the same time - believe me, I've tried it (laughs).

Some are blessed with musical ability, others with good looks. Myself, I was blessed with modesty.

Finding a good bus driver can be as important as finding a good musician.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

How do I get to Carnegie Hall?

A good player can make any guitar sound good.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

I feel like artists that are always quite sad in real life always make really happy music, and artists who are really bouncy and bubbly always make really sad music.

I feel sorry for a culture that depends too much on delegating its musical expression to professionals. It is fine to have heroes, but we should do our own singing first, even if it is never heard beyond the shower curtain.

The blues ain't nothing but a good man feelin' bad.

music became my refuge and then my salvation.

If you're the biggest DJ in the world, you're in a position where you can play stuff that people don't know and blow people's minds. But if you just chose to play stuff they know just to get a reaction, that's just being lazy.

I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.

If you cannot teach me to fly, teach me to sing.

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.

Talent is only the starting point.

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

Music is a fundamental human right

[Bach is the] reason I became a musician

Mozart died too late rather than too soon.

I frequently hear music in the heart of noise.