You know, I am just a musician and I have no idea these days what good and bad is in terms of labels.
I still have a fantasy of being a musician when I grow up.
My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today’s college graduates and Ph.D.’s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.
You know, it’s funny… when you’re making money, people don’t think you’re playing jazz. Now when you’re not making money, people think that you’re a good jazz musician.
As a musician, I don’t think I’m the greatest guitar player. I’m a bigger fan of the drums than I am the guitar; I just happen to play guitar. I play drums almost every day at my house. I wrote a lot of songs behind the drum kit, just having the music and vocals in my head and playing the rhythm.
There are times when what you do will be mysterious to everyone… times when you have to change directions before people are ready. Just because someone does something that critics don’t like or understand doesn’t mean you’re failing as a musician. It probably means you’re growing.
It’s funny, I guess when I was growing up, I didn’t really think about being an instrumentalist, per se. I didn’t think, well, I want to be a piano player, or, I want to be a guitar player, or even, I want to be a singer. I just wanted to be a musician.
Rachmaninoff made a musician out of me. His ‘Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini’ was the piece that sent me into raptures. It spoke to me. To me, it was a tender entreaty for the misunderstood.
What a good session musician does is listen to the song, to the artist, and to the other players. That way you can help bring out the song and help the artist express what they want to express. It’s never about you stepping out and showing you can play something fancy.
Growing up listening to rap music, you almost feel like you should have haters. That’s an important part of being a successful musician. It’s a good thing, I guess.
Art has been good for my soul. And it’s been good for my brain. I think I’m a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.
I knew nothing of the real life of a musician, but I seemed to see myself standing in front of great crowds of people, playing my accordion.
We at Interscope put projects out with anyone we believe has a great idea and is a true talent, whether it’s a musician, photographer, software developer, or technology innovator.
I didn’t decide to become a musician until the age of 15, which is quite late.
The life of any musician really doesn’t fall into a normal schedule at all. Every week there are different rehearsals, different days and nights of performances, so we don’t have a particular pattern that we can follow. For a conductor, it is a little bit worse because we have to allow for traveling.
If a musician wants to be an actor, everyone thinks that’s pretty cool. But if an actor wants to play a song, even if they’ve been doing it for 40 years, that’s bad news.
As a Latin musician, I understand that there are so many places where people don’t know who I am. My albums never came out in Australia or Japan.
As a musician, I have always strived for my albums and live performance to render a sound as close as possible to perfection.
TLC has helped me to know that as a musician, I can talk about anything; that there are no barriers, and that you can be yourself. That’s what I love about them. Left Eye in particular helped me to stay on top of my A game. She’s one of the best female MCs that I’ve heard.
As I look back over my life, before I had any real identity, I was a traveler. I grew up an Army brat, a runaway, an activist, and a musician. All my life I’ve been traveling.
I am a musician. I didn’t know I would be so when I was young. I do know that I have always heard music in my head that I wasn’t hearing somewhere else and I ‘needed’ this music. And obedient to the laws of nature, I created into this vacuum.
I can’t choose a favorite musician, because I love music so much that whatever/whomever I’m listening to at that moment is my favorite.
I was born in Swansea in the Principality of Wales in September 1934 and named Clive William John Granger. The ‘William John’ names were traditional Granger boy’s names, and my mother liked the name Clive because some popular musician at the time had it.
Playing in my early bands, working as a studio musician, producing and going to art school was, in retrospect, my apprenticeship. I was learning and creating a solid foundation of ideas, but I wasn’t really playing music.
It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.
Growing up, I wanted to be a musician. My mother, in typical Filipino-mom fashion, would always make me go up in front of people at parties to sing. Back then, as a kid, I was mortified. In retrospect, I see that doing that as a child helped me get over my fear of being in front of people.
It took me way beyond what I knew, into places of which I was totally scared, but as I became less frightened, I welcomed new ways of thinking and approaching something. It made me an infinitely richer person, and I think a better musician.
I personally see myself as a musician in the first place. You know, I don’t want to say I will be a producer and DJ for the rest of my life. I can totally see myself being in another band in five years, if that’s what my heart and soul wants to do, if that’s what will make me happy. I’m totally happy to just not DJ anymore.
I didn’t want to become a personality, I wanted to be a musician, but because I didn’t have an album to stand by yet it was hard for people to see that. But now, two albums in, I’m happy with things.
As the mother teaches her children how to express themselves in their language, so one Gypsy musician teaches the other. They have never shown any need for notation.
I don’t want to be defined solely by what I do as a jazz musician at a club or a festival. That’s not all of me. It’s not even close.
There’s still a lot I need to do as a player, as a musician, as a sound creator. I have commissioned 170 pieces: that’s still not enough, there are still lots and lots of composers I would like to approach. When I see a composer and I see a performer, I think to combine those forces.
Music is there for us to explore. To intentionally limit yourself to one, two, or three genres is limitation at its worst. Music is huge; it’s a gigantic history lesson, and if you are true music fan or a musician, you should explore it. It’s all right there in front of us.
It is rare that even a jazz musician finds an individual voice.
Ike’s problem was that he was a musician that always wanted to be a star; and was a star, locally, but never internationally… so he then changed the name to Ike and changed my name to Tina because if I ran away, Tina was his name. It was patented as you call it.
When I met my wife Vicky’s family, I had to go out of my way to convince them, to show them, that I wasn’t anything like their idea of a musician.
There is one thing that freezes a musician more than the deadliest physical cold, and that is the spiritual chill of an unresponsive audience!
I’m a working musician, so it’s what I do. I kind of always have lots of plates spinning, and it’s the ones that keep spinning the longest that I end up doing.
I’d rather give up my ears than my eyes, which might sound unusual for a musician.
As a musician, I’ve accomplished what I hoped to accomplish.
Being a musician and artist can feel superficial at times – you talk about yourself every day and pose for photos for the magazines and newspapers, and it can be very tiring for your well-being.
I’m a producer. I’m a musician. And my job is to come in and, you know, put – you know, I treat all of the artists that I work with, like, you know, the way da Vinci was looking at Mona Lisa, you know, there’s an interesting backdrop.
As a musician, basically the masses never thought I was a musician.
Being a musician doesn’t take away your right as a citizen to speak your mind.
I’d have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I’d just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.
Folk musicians have a lot of the same self-importance, but they’re way more cruel and jealous than rock musicians – I know this for a fact because I used to be a folk musician.
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
As a musician myself, it annoys the hell out of me to watch an actor trying to play a guitar out of time with the music.
‘SNL’ is probably one of the premiere outlets that a musician can perform on that isn’t obviously a music outlet.
When I went on tour with my father, I knew he was a musician. But they were my parents. I still think of my mum as being kind of a dork – a cooler one, but still a dork.
I love when people are coming up and they’re working hard and you can see that they’re really focused on the process to their music. I really dig that. As a musician, it’s nice to see people who really care about the process.
