I think for a classical musician the goal is the same as an electronic musician. A very good professional classical musician must not think about technique.
Being an actor is a much more structured life than being a musician.
I'm having to cope with the fact that some people might consider me a musician.
A lot of the way I sing is playing off other musicians. It's what I love to do the most.
There are a lot better musicians than me out there that just haven't had the luck to fall into everything like I have.
Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.
I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene.
I liked rock music going back to the '60s, but I never ever had any desire to be a rock musician and when I started doing a band it was experimental music.
My start came with experimental musicians and live bands. I never played with DJ's because it wasn't really the correct fit. It fit in more with someone using a laptop to create their own electronic music. When you're doing music like that, it's hard to get more than 20 people to come to your show.
Whenever I heard a musician do something that I could not explain, I went back to the theory in order to figure it out.
I prefer live musicians whenever possible. And I tailor the ensemble to what is appropriate for the film and the score I'm writing.
It was a natural thing for me to go become a musician, and then to start writing music. I don't even really remember making a decision to go into music, it was just there for me, always. If I weren't making a living at it, I'd still be writing music.
People see musicians on a huge stage playing a festival for 80,000 people and are like, "Oh, they have such magnetism," but it always embarrasses me more than it makes me feel proud.
I prefer to think of myself as a musician who is still learning and trying to do something every time out.
Charlie Parker was the greatest individual musician that ever lived. Every instrument in the band tried to copy Charlie Parker, and in the history of jazz there had never been one man who influenced all the instruments.
You are in a state of mixing, and you just live with it. There is not one musician who is completely happy with a mix.
I grew up in a farm town in Indiana. In the early years I played by myself, because there were no other musicians around.
I know of musicians who have played together for decades who hate each other. The Modern Jazz Quartet for one.
My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.
I wasn't really that good at being a musician. And then I tried being a standup. I was an actor. I was a photographer. I tried everything. Nothing was particularly working for me, but then, as a musician, I wrote jokes for comics. And they started to buy my jokes, and that's where I thought maybe that might work.
A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.
Frank [Zappa] always wanted to do a sound library - he sampled so many great musicians. For piano, for example, he sampled every octave, not just one (that you could just transpose electronically), and he did all different types of attack, with and without pedals, all that kind of stuff.
I thought for a minute about an actor and a musician simultaneously, but I think that's always very loaded as an actor when you become a "slash," and you do an actor "slash" anything. You better be really, really good at it.
Punk, and rock in general, is often very myopic. When people sing about "the world," they're generally focused almost entirely on the west and Europe. Sometimes South America. Sometimes Asia. But rarely Africa. The Ex, famously, is one of the few rock acts to travel and perform in Africa which, may be home to more musicians than just about anywhere else in the world.
I always loved the look of musicians. I've always admired them because they have a look - when I was growing up, it seemed that the ones I liked didn't need to have a stylist.
