It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites – opposite bends, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity – where energies flow smoothly in one direction – there will be much doing but no music.
Music Quotes
It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing.
This severe, ascetic music, calm and horizontal as the line of the ocean, monotonous by virtue of its serenity, anti-sensuous, and yet so intense in its contemplativeness that it verges sometimes on ecstasy.
I can’t stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain’t music, it’s close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.
The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
I know only two tunes: one of them is “Yankee Doodle” and the other one isn’t.
People don’t understand the kind of fight it takes to record what you want to record the way you want to record it.
My biggest kick in music – playing or writing – is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?
It’s nonsense to talk so much about being faithful to the ideals of one’s youth. There is room for development surely. I have always felt happiest in life when I thought I had added if only a little to the ideals of my youth. What is life more than a struggle for the realization truths? […]
No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music, or it isn’t music.
