I've never been really interested in music, classical or otherwise, where the craft is more important than the result. I realized quickly that I'd never be a technical electronic musician.
I never use someone just because they are great musicians. I work with people who have the same kind of feeling towards the music that I do, and the subject that I'm speaking of at that time.
"What can I offer you that will make you happier about how you should feel about who Angelina Jolie is?" I think that's a very strange desire to know those things. And yet I have it, with musicians in particular. I'm desperate to know what Micah P. Hinson is like or Julian Casablancas. Philip Seymour Hoffman made me feel like that.
Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.
To be a good musician, you need to give people what they want, what they need.
As a musician, you just want to be able to do what you love.
I have a thing: I will always put money in for any street musician anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. It's like giving back the money I got.
The jazz guitarist Peter Sprague calls his home recording studio SpragueLand, but sometimes it seems that the moniker better captures the way he has turned the entire southland into his own musical playground. Sprague is a highly versatile musician who draws on the wellsprings of jazz and Brazilian music as primary influences.
Many an American jazz musician has been beguiled by the lush melodies and sumptuous rhythms of Brazilian music, but Peter Sprague has taken the romance a good deal further than most.
It was clear from the beginning that I was going to be a musician.
I haven't had that many people onstage for a while, and I'm looking forward to that. They're all such creative musicians in their own right. They're all complete individuals. They're not just a pick-up band. They all have their own thing going on.
I think I've always felt as a band and as a musician and a music business person, I've always felt like an outsider, period.
I personally feel that acting is not totally different from singing and being a musician.
With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.
One day, a musician asked me what I did. When I told him I was to be a businessman, he laughed and said, You are not a businessman. Sometimes all it takes is one person to put an important thought in your head, and he did.
I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff, Motown and Stooges. But also early rock-and-roll like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley. I feel like as I grew older, I've been working with different musicians, people that have are constantly showing me different things.
I hate saying I'm a new musician, because I've been doing this forever, but they like to put new musicians on a lot of weird bills.
I want to change and try new ideas - allowing your sonic identity to evolve in your music and not being afraid of that. You see musicians hit upon something that works, and then go, "Let's keep doing that for 10 years." And that idea kind of terrifies me a little bit. It becomes like a day job then.
That was a very natural process because as I was creating the animatic I added music clips as reference of the kind of music I wanted in the film. These were from musicians like Naná Vasconcelos and Barbatuques, the body percussion group.
One of the great things about being in a band is that you meet so many other musicians who will turn you on to stuff you would never have otherwise found out about.
Most of the time when musicians get together, there's always that variance - always someone's a little ahead of the beat, someone's a little behind, you just hope it meshes.
I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.
I just like so many different kinds of music that I like experimenting. I don't want to keep making the same record over and over and over. I'm an 'evolve or die' kind of a musician. I think it's cool to try new things.
Every musician I have ever heard has influenced me. I often find I emulate micro-aspects of an artist, and combine it to form something new and unique.
Of course, you have to have a good reputation, especially as an artist, as a musician, so that other musicians would like to play with you.
