Blues musicians don't retire. They drop.
You do not become a master musician by playing just as you please, by imagining that learning the scales is sheer legalism and bondage! No, true freedom in any area of life is the consequence of regular discipline. It is no less true of the life of prayer.
The bottom line is that musicians love to make music and always will.
If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?
When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.
Combing my hair doesn't make me a better musician.
Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night.
And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.
A friend of mine took me to Memphis advised me that I should get in the musicians' union. He gave me a set of drums and said, Stay on the job, son.
As a musician, I hear the harmonic value of everything - I just enjoy music.
I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.
We're not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.
All rock musicians are deaf... Or insensitive to mellow sounds.
To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.
So far I've been very, very fortunate because it appears that people like to hear the music I like to play. What more fortunate position can a musician be in?
I wanted to make the kind of records that I heard in the discos that I danced in at that time. Funky, electronic sounds, while the musicians in the band were more rock oriented. This I suppose created the sound we know as Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.
I thought I had swell ideas, and wonderful musicians, but the hell of it, no one else did.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.
You've got to create the space, then fill it.
I like having my hair and face done, but I'm not going to lose weight because someone tells me to. I make music to be a musician not to be on the cover of Playboy.
I want to make a picture that could stand on its own, regardless of what it was a picture of. I've never been a bit interested in the fact that this was a picture of a blues musician or a street corner or something.
Reps once took chances on art, History's most treasured musicians were believed in and cultivated to reach their potential. Today, it would be difficult for those musicians to get deals.
Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.
I don't think any musician ever thinks about making a statement. I think everybody goes into music loving it.
