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.
I’m a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don’t play for a year, my chops aren’t going to get any worse. I’ve spent my time playing scales, and I don’t necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.
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 grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.
I’m going to have classical piano lessons next.
My mom was a piano teacher. It turned into something of a competition between me and her students… I liked the idea that I needed to be better than everybody else.
I grew up with a piano, and my aunt taught me chords. I played with bands in high school and I could do like, C chord, G chord, D chord; really simple, rhythm piano.
A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.
Karl Johnson, my first piano player at Milt Trenier’s, he just swung really hard and gave me a sense of really belonging to the jazz scene.
For Ripley I learned to play some songs on the piano, and I never really played them again.
I’m a kid for a living: I get to play the piano for a living.
I gave up lots of things I love doing: writing, and business, and playing the piano and so on.
When my dad went to college to get his master’s from Loyola, he was playing Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven. But he played all that New Orleans stuff, too. I would go with my dad to gigs, pick up the piano and the speakers, and I would be like his roadie.
I have two favorites: Reading Kierkegaard while listening to Mozart’s Piano Concerto 9 in E Flat Major, and reading early Bazooka Joe comics in Hebrew.
In college I had a weekend gig at a restaurant, a solo thing that was the best practice I could have ever had. That’s where I learned to coordinate my singing and my piano playing.
No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.
I wasn’t even a theater kid in high school. I studied classical piano, and I ran track.
The way it works: The orchestra plays a few selections of its own and I terminate the first part of the programme on piano, usually with a movement from a Mozart concerto.
I don’t put boundaries on myself when I sit at the piano.
I’m musical in the sense that I can write a song, but I realised when I was learning the piano as a child that there were people who played it so much better.
My original dream was to become a singer-songwriter, so I sent a video of myself playing the piano and singing to all the big agencies.
Piano is one of those instruments you don’t have to be good at to sound good – you just have to know where to put three little fingers, which is really pretty easy to figure out.
When she started to play, Steinway came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano.
I tend to write at the piano, but usually the melody and lyrics come first. Like, I’ll be in the shower, and I’ll start singing, and the melody and the lyric will just come out. Then I’ll quickly try to finish the shower, try to remember it, record it on my phone and save it for the studio.
After a while, though, you realize that a whole slew of young singer-songwriter piano players are getting compared to you. That’s when you feel the passage of time is occurring.
Every day a piano doesn’t fall on my head is good luck.
Everybody besides my piano player has been with me since the very first day. We were a four-piece band for a solid two years. It was me playing acoustic and rhythm electric guitar, a bass player, a drummer and a lead guitar player. For a couple of years, we sounded like the Foo Fighters.
My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I’d crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.
Mother, being a pianist, told me how to play with my fingers on the piano.
My little brother and I took piano lessons at a young age and played music together later on in life just to play around at home until we decided to make a record. Eventually we started having more and more songs.
I have damaged nerve endings on the right side, so my piano style comes from designing stuff I can play with my right hand. And some of it effectively mimics classical stuff.
When I wake up in the morning, and I go to the piano, and there’s a blank sheet of paper in front of me, by the end of the day, that could be a gold mine. You really do need to wake up and expect that the world is your oyster because it very well may be.
If you hear Thelonious Monk play a run that goes from the top of the piano, OK, he has opened up the Grand Canyon with that. He’s the river that’s carved this entire space that we call the Grand Canyon. He does that with one run. He lets you know, like, what the possibility of the sound of the piano can do.
My first big break came with Lauryn Hill on a track called Everything is Everything, I played piano on that track way back in 1998.
I know what my taste is, and I do like my touch on the piano.
I took piano lessons when I was really young, like five years old, and I didn’t really enjoy that very much. It was kind of too strict. So when I was probably 11 or 12, I started playing guitar and just kind of taught myself.
I was a lifeguard, camp counselor, the president of the YMCA Leaders Corps. I also took piano lessons. I was a dancer.
There is no better feeling in the universe, other than being married and having a family, than standing on stage behind a piano and having 5,000 people waving at you. You cannot bottle that.
Piano was my first instrument, but it wasn’t the instrument that I showed the most proficiency on.
I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook – what I want the track to be about melodically – and then I’ll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments.
One does not play the piano with one’s fingers: one plays the piano with one’s mind.
Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!
I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired.
My entire life, I’ve always known that I wanted to be a performer, but I didn’t know exactly how, where or when. I never learned or studied the craft, formally. I grew up doing martial arts and playing piano. But, something inside of me always said that I was going to do this, as far back as I can remember.
My grandmother was fond of painting and playing the piano. She had been given lessons by Emmanuel Chabrier, who used to spend the summer months in nearby Membrolle.
At the end of the day, who I really and truly am is a little girl who loved to play the piano.
I play piano and drums very poorly and French horn and tuba all equally as bad.
I feel very lucky, and the work that I do doesn’t depend on much. If your vision’s still good, and your hands – I have no arthritis in my hands, and I play the piano very easily – I don’t think there’s any reason to deprive oneself of the fun of working. Music is so rewarding.
Oh yeah, we all write. That’s what’s great about when you have basics in piano.
To finally be able to actually play the piano with vocalists and actually do, like, a proper concert – that feels really good.
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.
I grew up sitting beside my grandmother playing the piano and singing.
The last thing that scared me… it was probably something stupid, like when someone jumped out at me, or I thought my new dog had gone to the toilet underneath my piano. Lots of silly things.
Most pianists listen to about four or five different piano players before they call it quits and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got my thing together.’ Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and maybe Chick Corea. Or maybe before that, Oscar Peterson.
My sister plays piano, and my brother used to be on the drums. My dad sings; he’s got a good voice.
Music is something I couldn’t live without. My dad was into music, he played for pleasure – guitar, piano. I started off doing jazz, singing with a lot of fabulous musicians here in London before I went to the States. And I still take piano lessons every Wednesday.
I had, like, a keytar. I was always attracted to the guitar, but I never really thought that I could be good at it because I was trained on piano, so it was kind of a jump.
I can play the piano. I started off with lessons, and then, as we always had a piano in the house, I would play around and became quite good.
