Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can see how different artists work, from writing to recording, just from being in the studio environment with them.
My own Brubeck Institute in California is turning out fantastic young jazz players, and I know great things will happen.
I would like to be a scholar in whatever I do, a scholar is never finished, he is always seeking and I am always seeking.
I no longer wanted to satisfy myself. I really want to connect with the world and make my music mean something to people.
I don't do something because I think it will sell 30 million albums. I couldn't care less. If it sells one, it sells one.
If I was a singer who won those Grammys, I'd be gracing all the magazine covers... I barely got asked to do an interview.
World peace is no longer some pie-in-the-sky thing, because no single person or country is going to solve it on their own.
You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.
My contributions were many: First clown director, with witty sayings and flashily dressed, now called master of ceremonies.
I am not afraid of European influences. The point is to use them, as Ellington did, as part of my life as an American Negro.
I taught myself off records, Memphis Slim, them old piano players, then added to it. Yeah, hard and loud, beat it to pieces.
I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.
It's part of my nature. I get excited when trying out new stuff, whether it be an idea or equipment. It stimulates my juices.
It's not instant composing; it's not following any kind of a formula. All you do is hear music in your head and reproduce it.
Your main radio stations, the stations that get the most listeners, don't play anything that has any kind of integrity to it.
The first choral music I remember hearing was Handel's 'Messiah' when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast it over the radio.
I never call myself modern or traditional, in our out, new or used, because I prefer not to be hemmed in by rigid definitions.
I'm happy whenever anybody does my material. I don't care what they do with it. I do what I want to with other people's songs.
Mr. McVicker instilled self-respect in those of us who were his students, because he respected us regardless of our background.
You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.
At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.
Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
Jazz to me is the spirit of freedom. I mean real freedom. Freedom to explore. Freedom to express. Freedom to pour out your guts.
I don't dig that two-beat jive the New Orleans cats play. My boys and I have to have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating.
Tatum plays so much piano it sounds impossible. The more I hear him, the more I want to give up the piano and drive a milk truck.
If one's life depends on doing something right, as in the case of the tightrope walker, one will practice on a much deeper level.
There's a few tunes of mine that don't have jokes, but most of them have a joke and they have a humorous point of view somewhere.
My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.
When I came to New York after high school in 1959 and started to meet musicians, 'Hot House' was like a standard jam session tune.
Each human being exists because there's something they have to offer for the evolution of the universe that only they can fulfill.
The worst thing about the life of a jazz musician on the road is getting to the gig. Once you're there and playing, it's marvelous.
You can expand, repeat, even change keys and do other things electronically to give certain elements and phrases more cohesiveness.
As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.
I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can't define it beyond that.
I feel like everybody's life literally has a soundtrack because we love music so much, and there are so many songs that people love.
There's a time when you have to explain to your children why they're born, and it's a marvelous thing if you know the reason by then.
Jazz is a music that is open enough to borrow from any other form of music, and has the strength to influence any other form of music.
We all have to open our minds, stretch forth, take chances and venture out musically to try and arrive at something new and different.
Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing.
Around 2009, my audience started getting a lot more mainstream - younger people, R&B and hip-hop fans mixed in with the jazz audience.
If you take the creation of music and the creation of your own life values as your overall goal, then living becomes a musical process.
When I was first aware that I couldn't read music I didn't know I couldn't read because I could play the music that was in front of me.
I wanted to be like my father, who was a cattle man and a rodeo roper. And that was - he was my hero, and I wanted to be more like him.
We all have music in us - your heartbeat is your drum, your voice is your sound - and music is supposed to put you in tune with nature.
There's a pianist out of Boston who made a beautiful record for the Fresh Sound label called "Sketch Book"; his name is Vardan Ovsepian.
I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.
Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.
I understand about the relative strengths of people, and I don't think people have to be anything. They can be nothin' if they want to be.
I learned the importance of being nonjudgmental, taking what happens and trying to make it work.That's something you should apply to life.
You know, I've sung a lot of emotional songs in my life, but when you're writing it yourself, it's very difficult to decide what to reveal.