 Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life. |
| It's hard to get into Newsweek because, as more of our former intellectual magazines take on a pop focus, if there's no buzz, there's no interest. |
| If it's not going to sound like Terrapin Station, what's the point of playing Terrapin Station? |
| If you're going to use standards as criteria for signing musicians, you can sign thousands. If you're going to use some sort of conceptual interpretation that's based on the tradition of those standards, but is trying to move away from it, you're down to about 10 people or so. |
| My dad was a musician, it was just what he did, like another guy's dad drives a meat truck. Our house was normal. We weren't taken with the fact our dad was a musician. |
| A lot of musicians have a tough time hearing what we're doing in a trio format. |
| There's not one Tin Pan Alley song on my record. |
| Pop doesn't really look back. It can't. What makes pop work is simplicity. |
| One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community. |
| We played it as long as we could play it on that CD and I think it might be 50 minutes, maybe. What you have to do is play a couple of songs and then get off the stage because everything that trails it sounds stupid. |
| I think that if you keep banging at the door all you need is a little foothold, a little tiny foothold, and then the rest will take care of itself. |
| The lion's share of what I hear right now are people who, intentional or accidental, have avoided all jazz prior to 1960. And all the musicians who were successful in the '60s spent their entire lives, prior to 1960, listening to all the musicians these people avoid. |
| Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic. |
| I gave up my base in popular culture when I left the Tonight Show. |
| You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don't. |
| That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you. |
| I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense. |
| Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups. |
| The piano is the X factor. People have a tough time following the structures when there's no piano there, spelling it out. It makes it more easily understood, particularly to people who don't know as much about music. |
| When you're dealing with music without words, titles are more a means of identification than anything else. What's the point of getting lofty? |
