I realized I was a girl playing with all of these great musicians, but race and gender never did cross my mind, really, until other people started talking about them. They weren’t really an issue for me.
I realized that improvisers should probably always have time off. But musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute – unless something drastic occurs.
I talk to people who are musicians, and they go, Oh this is hell. And I go, Are you kidding me? You never put tar paper on a roof, did ya?
It’s like Liverpool. Everybody went for the music. All the young musicians seemed to gravitate to Asbury Park.
Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there’s a way to do it without it being a jazz record.
Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.
And I always actually say, ‘The Voice’ isn’t just about trying to find a superstar. We also give a platform to gigging musicians and people who do what they do, and expose them to so many other people to enhance what they do.
People want to see musicians sing things that come from their own mind and own heart in real time, responding to the moment for them.
My father was a painter. There was a lot of singing. We hung around with a lot of folk musicians. My family knew a lot of great folk musicians of the time, like Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Leadbelly. They were all people we knew.
Even when I was fighting in China I met some guys on the local circuit that we’re fighting, they didn’t enjoy it, they wanted to be musicians and do other things, but they’re just fighting because it pays the bills and they get money for it.
I lived in an area where there were a lot of rock musicians, and we got together regularly in our studios.
I was never worried that synthesizers would replace musicians. First of all, you have to be a musician in order to make music with a synthesizer.
All musicians and artists – we all got quirks that have to be put up with at certain times.
I was pretty strict in high school about who I would listen to. Musicians like Neil Young, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell… who were, in my opinion, great writers. The music mattered, but it held hands with the lyrics, and the personality was, overall, unsullied.
A lot of young musicians in Stockholm are about keeping tradition alive and moving it forward at the same time.
I grew up in a house that was always happy, and my family was always music, music. I started playing percussion very young, because I had some uncles who were musicians and all my aunts were singers.
When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.
Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life’s work.
I always wish I’d had more mentors, better mentors, wiser mentors, people who were proper professional working musicians to guide me as I was coming up.
There are a lot of musicians who are still desperately trying to pretend that it’s 1998 and by having a huge marketing campaign, they somehow believe that they can sell 10 million records. That’s delusional. No one sells 10 million records. The days of musicians getting rich off of selling records are done.
We live in a world where art exists in galleries and museums, and musicians have to play the same venues over and over.
There seems to be an inclination among rock musicians to be very carefree with money, but I negotiate the best flight and hotel deals on our tours to maximise the band’s income – I don’t want too see too much taken off the top line.
The Eagles are four very alpha personalities. We’ve all done solo work, and we’ve all played with very good musicians, but when the four of us get together, it becomes something that’s much bigger than any one of us.
I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene.
Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
I owe everything to the musicians I work with.
I’ve dated a couple of guys who were awesome, and the celebrity part of my life and the traveling part are hard to get around. You never get to see each other, especially if you’re both musicians.
Those little nimble musicians of the air, that warble forth their curious ditties, with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art.
No one told Miles Davis or BB King to pack it in. John Lee Hooker played literally up to the day he died. Why should pop musicians be any different?
It’s good to be in a position to know that I’ve inspired musicians, from what I’ve learned to lay down personally, and collectively with Led Zeppelin.
I’ve done my share of busking, and it’s fun until it isn’t. There are musicians in the subways that will make you cry, they’re so good.
I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.
There are a lot better musicians than me out there that just haven’t had the luck to fall into everything like I have.
Music’s always been at the heart of Apple. It’s deep in our DNA. We’ve sold Macs to musicians since the beginning of Macs.
Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.
There’s Eddie’s conviction and his lyrics and his ideals, and he can just rock straight out. His vocals are incredible. And we all are really competent musicians.
Musicians keep playing when the lights go out, when people are suffering, confused, or angry.
In theory, I’d like to work in a group. But the group I’d like to work in, all the musicians in them are long since dead.
When it comes to independent music albums, you cannot put in 50 lakhs or a crore in each and every song to first make a video and then even promote it. It’s not possible for a musician or a singer to promote each song. It’s not possible for musicians to do that independently.
The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won’t succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.
I get really insecure because even though I can speak in musician’s terms, I don’t know as much as real musicians.
I realized pretty soon that I have to do more than just play bass in the background way. So, I developed a kind of playing which only a handful of musicians accepted.
I think a lot of musicians play for the playback. I mean, that’s the joy of recording – you want to hear what you’ve done and what you’ve contributed – but never listening to that playback kind of removes the intellectual part of making music, and it removes the tendency to be revisionist.
I was afraid the other musicians might want to present themselves too much, though I see in the coverage I’ve received of the album that the musicians got wonderful reviews for their contributions and abilities. I think the four musicians played freely within my limits.
There’s something about live players that you cannot get with machines: With live musicians, you can strike a groove, you can feed off each other… And, even though somebody might make a slight mistake, it’s all real!
I have no desire to make money off musicians. I just want to promote them because I want to share music.
Most of my arguments with musicians through the years have had more to do with their attitude about music, or their attitude about their own lives, or their personal responsibility. Music has never really been the big centerpiece of the fight.
It was by listening to Goodman’s band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.
Ideally, musicians belong outside the Establishment. When they cross that line, it’s like something in them has died.
I was living in New York. Sometimes, our gang of musicians would go to Louis Armstrong’s home and play records. It was a lesson, like going to school at night. Ella Fitzgerald was an inspiration, too, a unique artist. When you had an opportunity to be with people like them, you cherished it.
