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Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano. She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz.
I love music and I enjoy creating sounds. I got into making music when I was a child, starting with the spoons and the koto before moving onto the piano.
Both of my mom's parents were music teachers, so I was hearing the fundamentals of playing the piano, what notes are, and all those things very early on.
I don't think about commercial concerns when I first come up with something. When I sit down at the piano, I try to come up with something that moves me.
I can play the guitar, the dulcimer, the piano, and the drums. However, I am not a "performance quality" musician. Rather, I am a composer and a producer.
That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.
My appearance was always good and my ability to play on the piano, especially ragtime, which was then at the height of its vogue, made me a welcome guest.
My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!
All my momma's people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.
It was a very odd household, because the grandmothers were so different. Both of them had their own pianos. So it would be duelling pianos by grandmothers.
Now I approach climbing differently. I have learned less effort and energy, less obsession, and more feeling, as with piano, more emphasis and less frenzy.
God didn't give me the ability to play the piano, or paint a picture or have compassion. But... he did give me the ability to crack a walnut with my hoo-ha.
When I was recording from '70 to '82, I always played piano and laid the tracks down. But I used to talk to the other musicians while the track was playing.
I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
I play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life.
Piano keys jangled as he got to his feet. "Our own Sleeping Beauty. Who finally kissed you awake?" "Nobody. I woke up on my own." "Was there anyone with you?
I play the piano. I bought an upright piano that is actually electric, so I can practice my scales with headphones on and not make my neighbours' lives hell!
It [piano lessons] wasn't a priority, but it was an interest and through that I became acquainted with classical music, which was a main interest at the time.
I also have a big love of classical music played on piano because this is the environment I grew up in my brother being one of the great masters in this world.
I played, like, a year of piano until I learned the 'Pink Panther' theme. That was my goal. Once I was good enough, I quit. Now my music has to have some rock.
I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing. And it was my secret thing and my passion.
If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
With the piano I'm completely in control of the gestural situation-not that I'm going to play the piece myself, but I know what's difficult, what's impossible.
If I had spent a quarter of the time that I spent manipulating my sexuality in front of a piano instead, I would be the most gifted piano player of my lifetime.
I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.
I always wanted to be a full-time musician. Every television job I had was a means to buy a grand piano, or to put in a recording studio, or something like that.
I play piano and that's my love. I read and I paint and I compose music, so I've got a pretty full creative life. And it's not because, I'm obsessively creative.
I wouldn't be able to act like Al Pacino or play the piano like Dr. John, But I could probably act better than Dr. John and play the piano better than Al Pacino.
In one of our concert grand pianos, 243 taut strings exert a pull of 40,000 pounds on an iron frame. It is proof that out of great tension may come great harmony.
I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.
If I get frustrated, the first thing I'll do is get up from the piano - completely mindlessly - and walk over to the cupboard and pull out something salty to eat.
I started playing the piano when I was about two and got a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore when I was five. But I left when I was 11.
I had studied piano since I was 13, but I was surrounded by students who'd been playing since they were 5. I realized I was never going to be anything but mediocre.
I use music as therapy. Whenever I'm feeling angry or needing some 'me' time, which is quite regularly, I'll go and bang a piano or flesh out something on a guitar.
Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.
I was always involved in the arts from a young age. I started studying classical piano at age four as a student of the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music.
But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?" Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don't.
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.
If you want to play piano, you just gotta love piano, and I loved the way that music sounded from the beginning. Always did - everything about an instrument I loved.
When I lost a tennis match that made me upset or hurt emotionally I would find myself going to the piano and playing for hours. It was my place of refuge and solace.
I did take composition lessons when I was in high school, so I wrote piano pieces. I wrote some chamber music. I don't think any of that was particularly interesting.
My father was always playing the piano. He played all kinds of music - Gershwin, all kinds of stuff. He was really a hugely encouraging force to me when I was little.
If anyone can show me ... that there is any reason - other than fear - to believe in any version of an afterlife, I'll give you my piano, one of my legs, and my wife.
If you lock me in the room with a piano teacher for a year I might be able to knock out a rendition of 'Roll Out The Barrel,' but will I ever be a concert pianist? No.
Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?
When I was young, I just sat down and started playing Chopsticks at the piano. I got so far and then lost interest. Eventually, I regained it and started writing songs.
The piano's world encompasses glass-nerved virtuos and stomping barrel-housers in fedoras; it is a world of pasture and storm, of perfumed smoke, of liquid mathematics.
As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.
I never planned on being a live performer. My whole forte was about being in the studio, producing, playing the piano on recording sessions. I was all about the studio.