Musician Quotes - Page 12

• An element I love about the blues is jamming with other musicians.

  Gary Hoey

  Elements

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• My interactions with musicians have been simply that: interactions with musicians. Issues of gender, or anything else beyond the music-making, have in my experience played no role in whether or not a musician has been able to articulate my intentions as a composer.

  Michael Hersch

  Issues, Able, Roles

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. April 14, 2014.

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• The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.

  Buddy Guy

  Clubs, Jazz, Disappear

  "Blues guitarist Buddy Guy". "Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. June 7, 2012.

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• 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.

  Angelique Kidjo

  People, Feelings, Use

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• Blues musicians don't retire. They drop.

  Buddy Guy

  Retiring, Blues Music

  "Buddy Guy: ‘Blues Musicians Don’t Retire, They Drop’". "PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. April 6, 2012.

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• I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Teacher, Opportunity, Class

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• My father was a teacher, my mama was a community worker, I taught in so many schools. So when you get that experience of how to communicate with younger people, put that hand on them and give them that old-school feeling, the maturity and adult, a lot of our kids just need the feeling of that love, and that's the frame of reference that I teach from and that's the frame of reference that all of our musicians in the Jazz at Lincoln Center.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Teacher, Father, Kids

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mean, Needs, Heritage

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong - go to the forefathers of our music - Jelly Roll Morton - they're not preaching a separatist agenda. They're not taking their music and saying, "This is for me."

  Wynton Marsalis

  America, Jelly, Agendas

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Reading and writing music is a wonderful way of getting ideas in your head down to someone else who reads and writes, but if you don't read and write, and the other musician you're playing with are trying to express something who doesn't read and write, than it's a question of "I wrote" so that you must learn from listening and from understanding where that's coming from.

  Ronnie Montrose

  Reading, Writing, Ideas

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• When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Church Music, Hymns, Dixie

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• When the film and music industries declined in the wake of increasingly conservative Muslim laws and social customs in Pakistan, many of these musicians found themselves out of work. They were brought together at Sachal Studios by Izzat Majeed, who built the studio in order to preserve these musical traditions.

  Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

  Order, Law, Musical

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth.

  John Coltrane

  Thinking, Majority

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• A good musician can do more to change society than 30 average mayors.

  Howard Roberts

  Average, Mayors, Can Do

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• Ultimately, musicians of the world must come to realize the potential of their calling... If the musician is illuminated from within, he becomes a lamp that lights other lamps.

  Kenny Werner

  Light, Lamps, Calling

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• When I was a little bitty kid, my aunt showed me how to play a little boogie. It took me years. I had to play the left-hand part with two hands, because my hands was so little. Then as I grew up and I learned how to play the left-hand part with one hand, she showed me how to play the right-hand part, and et cetera. My Uncle Joe showed me how to play a little bit different boogie stuff. I had people in my family that was professional musicians, but I just wasn't interested in what they did. I wasn't very open-minded to a lot of music that I'd be more open to today.

  Dr. John

  Uncles, Kids, Aunt

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• I am not a pop musician; I don't want to play bubble-gummy pop stuff.

  Neal Schon

  Play, Want, Stuff

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• Photography is not easy. You know it takes a painter or a sculpture or a musician years to perfect their technique. Then they're free to make an expression in a matter of moments. It takes moments for a photographer to perfect his technique. And then it takes years for him to make it into something that is truly creative and worthwhile.

  Paul Caponigro

  Photography, Expression, Years

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• You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative; you may play the piano most brilliantly, and not be a musician. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter. You may create a face, an image out of a stone, because you have learned the technique, and not be a master creator. Creation comes first, not technique.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Color, Play, Piano

  Jiddu Krishnamurti (1991). “The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti: 1948-1949, Choiceless awareness”, Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company

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• What you learn from working with other performers and musicians is invaluable, really, and can only help you grow. I mean, if you spend your whole life focusing on yourself, you're not really learning much.

  Damon Albarn

  Mean, Working With Others, Helping

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• High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.

  Steve Aoki

  School, Sleep, College

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• I didn't know if it would be a successful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter...I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along...I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't...The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

  Bruce Springsteen

  Writing, Successful, Age

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• We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Art, Honor, Mind

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• Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

  Virgil Thomson

  Communication, Impossible, Music Is

  Virgil Thomson (2016). “The State of Music: A Library of America E-Book Classic”, p.21, Library of America

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• One of the most obvious aspects of the music to people who know jazz is: How does it feel in the swing? These are things that are very subtle and that jazz musician appreciate in a particular way. I appreciate the way Tommy Flanagan swings, the way that Barry Harris swings, the great pulse that Hank Jones and Bill Evans have - end every one of them is different.

  Chuck Israels

  Swings, People, Appreciate

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