Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My roots are in my record player.
Improvisation is a compositional method.
Sometimes, I play a round of extremely poor golf.
I play more rhythmically than I do a lot of notes.
I didn't get where I am today by being timid, young man.
But I think the record will actually come from tapes that are not yet recorded.
Remarkable only the very best arrangers can get a sound like that from four horns
If the people dig it, then I dig it. If the people wanna hear it, then I wanna play it.
I play with toys. I have one plane that travels with me. It travels with the equipment.
You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses.
It doesn't matter how many times I've played 'Brown Sugar', I never get tired of playing it.
We just get up there and play rock-and-roll music, man. Everybody sweats and has a good time.
I think the voice does that perfectly adequately without being imitated by other instruments.
In the summertime, I played Little League baseball; football in the fall; basketball in the winter.
There are many of these apparent philosophical paradoxes or contradictions which don't concern me anymore.
To speak about notation as the only way that you can guarantee structure of course is already very suspect.
If I think about the way I was drawn into the music, it was much more by recordings than by live performances.
I always loved Little Anthony and the Imperials. They were like the precursors of the Temptations. I loved their music.
I've never thought of my name at the top of the marquee in any particular terms other than, you know, slight bewilderment.
In my mind these two instruments speak to me in different ways, and the solo stuff seems to be easier to do on the soprano.
The first session I did with the Stones was an accident. I just happened to be wandering down the hallway of the same studio.
So what starts is ad hoc and you never know where it's going to lead, so it's important to keep an open mind about those things.
I can't read music. That's not where I come from musically. I come strictly from feeling, and that feeling comes from rock & roll.
When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated.
I try to play the best I can every time I play. But there's just some folks that seem to draw a little bit of that extra special out of you.
I'd met Roscoe in Europe quite a few times over the years, and we'd say hi and so on, but this was the first time we'd actually played together.
I've never been one that thinks that the function of an instrument is to approach the purity of voice or the structure of a beautifully sung line.
I pull a lot of the stuff that I play off the rhythm tracks - and Keith Richards has been one of the main contributors to my inspirational playing.
We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.
I first went on the road with the Rolling Stones in the year of our Lord, 1969. But my grandfather gave me away to a drummer when I was 15 years old.
Of course when people are as talented as Jim O'Rourke or Gene Coleman, pretty soon you know that they're going to be part of the bigger scene anyway.
It's pretty scripted on the road: very organised and compartmentalised, and that's the way it has to be with so many people involved in a Stones tour.
I think the solo playing, the decision to start playing solo, came out of having discovered what lay behind the doors that that technique opened for me.
You got to realize that the vision, the image, according to 1964 U.S. rock and roll standards, was mohair suit and tie, and nicey-nicey ol' boy next door.
Of course I knew the work of Roland Kirk and Harry Carney and the specific uses they would make of circular breathing, so I knew it was physically possible.
I played in the high school band. I was the one baritone saxophone out of 80 other people. No one could tell whether I was hittin the right notes or the wrong notes.
I played in the high school band. I was the one baritone saxophone out of 80 other people. No one could tell whether I was hittin' the right notes or the wrong notes.
When you're not on the payroll, and you want to continue the Beverly Wilshire lifestyle, but you're only geared for a Holiday Inn existence, things are gonna catch up to you.
I've been to the studio several times, and it's not that I'm not happy with what I've got, but each time I come away, I feel that I've learned something that I want to work on.
In a certain sense, aspects of my solo playing were developed in order to test the theory about how long particular elements could be, as parts of so-called free improvisations.
Those early steps are very important in understanding the evolution. But in themselves, maybe now you need the later records to understand the significance of the earlier records!
A kind of synthesis, but with some elements that perhaps you wouldn't have expected in advance. I always like that when that happens, when something comes that is more than the sum of the parts.
It's not like, I don't know, if Madonna has a new record out, then everybody from Bangkok to Birmingham knows what its called and can buy it the same week. But our stuff is not in that mass market.
The argument we always used to use was that keeping records in the catalog was good for people that were coming new to the music, but I think that was talking over a ten year or fifteen year time span.
I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.
So I'm looking to the saxophone as a resource which has its own unique set of possibilities. I'm looking to exploit them and develop them and have the fullest range of possibilities of the saxophone be known.
John Lennon, who was a good friend of mine, he had one of the best senses of humor of any human being. And Keith Richards, fantastic sense of humor. They were smart, sharp. They had their own thoughts on matters.
I think it's a great document of John Stevens' originality. At that time he was already much more fully formed in his conception than I was. I was sort of struggling to keep up, and sometimes it's pretty obvious.
So in the sense that we were all dealing with that freer approach, yes, it was certainly one of the first contacts, perhaps the first contact, when Peter came that summer. So it's a very pivotal moment that is documented there.
There's an institution here called the National Sound Archive, and there's a character who works there, Paul Wilson. He takes a very special interest in the history of the music and advised Martin Davidson of the existence of these tapes.