Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I do miss the rhythms of comedy. And I've never been able to perform very well without an audience. The sitcoms I've done had them. It was like doing a little play.
I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.
So much music in Africa was created for specific moments, written for rituals or for a funeral or for challenges, thousands of years ago, and these rhythms are still used.
There's a couple of tracks on the new record which is sort of using similar sort of rhythms as the drum and bass tracks but playing it all live. It's a new approach to it.
In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.
I have a method of working on music: I'll get up in the morning and throw down some drums on my drum machine, and then I'll come back later and try to pop off rhythms to it.
My grandmother taught me the seasonality of food. She lived with the rhythms of nature. That's the way we should live. Why do we need raspberries in January flown from Chile?
Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In 'Pony Blues' and 'Peavine Blues,' he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.
Because I don't play guitar any more, African harmonies and rhythms have been an inspiration to me. I love the raw origin of the sound. It complements my voice and words naturally.
I just hear a beat and start mumbling words. I just hear sounds and rhythms, and it just kind of comes intuitively. Formatting a song, figuring out a flow, how I respond to the beat.
Whatever I do - whether it's directing, producing - I just come at things from characters, from stories, from jokes and scene rhythms. I'll always have that at the epicenter, I think.
A composer like me finds it impossible to work with today's producers. They want to tell you exactly how to compose, which notes to play, which rhythms to put in which part of the song.
When I'm creating a song, I'm thinking of a hip-hop beat playing on a live drum set - kinda like the Roots would do. I will put New Orleans music on top of that with some other rhythms.
In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household's natural rhythms.
I tend to start at 9 o'clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks.
It was very challenging, trying to add an orchestra on top of these traditional African rhythms, because as soon as you add any kind of melody or chords over it, it stops feeling African.
Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.
What always draws me back to the Caribbean vibes are the upbeat vibrations of welcoming melodies and positive energy exchange through the rhythms that make you feel like dancing with someone.
In western classical music with an orchestra, you focus the orchestra on melodies and harmony. In African music, the biggest focus is on rhythms and counter-rhythms - the complexity of rhythms.
The first lesson I've learned is that no matter what you do in your life, you have to figure out your own internal rhythms - I mean, what works for you doesn't necessarily work for your friend.
Rihanna is so into rock, and she gives me an empty canvas to work with. I get to do wild solos and crunch up the rhythms. It's rock, it's R&B, it's hip-hop, it's funky - all totally up my alley.
Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
I was really drawn to spoken-word style poetry. I loved the rhythms, and for some reason, I was just drawn to this poetry as a way of expressing my feelings, because I didn't have any other outlet.
When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.
The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it's increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.
In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.
It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.
I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.
So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms.
I don't think that swearing or gratuitous violence or sex make a show better. I just think there are natural rhythms to a human being in these situations, and what happens in these situations that cable allows is a natural reaction.
On the mountains mistakes are fatal. In politics, mistakes are wounding emotionally, but you recover. Personally, wilderness helps me get back in touch with natural rhythms, helps me reflect and, in the process, restore my creativity.
Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it, your body is doing math. The kids in their parents' garage practicing to be a band may not realize it, but they're also practicing math.
Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.
I don't like to define my music. To me, music is pure emotion. It's language that can communicate certain emotions and the rhythms cuts across genders, cultures and nationalities. All you need to do is close your eyes and feel those emotions.
I think going into 'New Moon,' I knew the characters better. I knew the world better and I knew the actors who would be playing these roles. I had a sense of their rhythms and tones. 'Twilight' I was writing in a vacuum. We hadn't cast it yet.
I think in terms of content and subjects and whatever kind of production it dictates. Can I conceive of an idea that would really connect with my personal rhythms and cost a lot of money? I don't gravitate in that direction, but it is possible.
If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.
When I'm writing stuff, I need to watch the scene in my head, like a little movie, or else it just feels stupid. It just feels very written. There are things that actors do and faces they make and pauses they take and their rhythms. You need that.
What kind of music keeps its relevance? That's why I purposely try and avoid any particularly current trends in electronic music. I do actively stay away from the most popular rhythms of the moment. In six weeks' time, those will sound out-of-date.
Hip hop scholarship must strive to reflect the form it interrogates, offering the same features as the best hip hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting.
In some ways, it's easier to be the lead. Week after week, scene after scene, the rhythms of filming force you to peel away a certain amount of artifice. When you're on set that much, there's a license to let the character emerge from the work itself.
I first heard African drum rhythms and chants at the movies. Then, when I had the opportunity to go to Africa and visit the villages, I heard the real, raw, true rhythms and realised the origins of the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South.
At school, I was never given a sense that poetry was something flowery or light. It's a complex and controlled way of using language. Rhythms and the music of it are very important. But the difficulty is that poetry makes some kind of claim of honesty.
I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.
I'm one of those people that feels that Americans that shouldn't do Shakespeare... The rhythms of the English language and the mannerisms of the English speech seems to work effortlessly with William Shakespeare, but when Americans do it, something seems stuck.
A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.
I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I've used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn't decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.
I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent.