Quotes About Experience

Clothes are like a good meal, a good movie, great pieces of music.

It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

Music is the soundtrack to life. It plays the melody of our being.

A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can't give you a formula for that.

A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life.

Look at the darkest hit musicals - Cabaret, West Side Story, Carousel - they are exuberant experiences. They send you out of the theater filled with music

I couldn't do country, with all due respect to all country music artists. My parents dressed me up with a cowboy hat and we'd go to the rodeo when I was younger and it traumatized me for life.

Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it. If you're swept away by it you can't wait to do it again and the same magical moments always come.

I can show you in music better than I can tell you in words.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

If you don't live it, you don't believe it.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside you, and take some of you with it when it leaves.

Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise... but a way of life.

If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know [about music].

There's nothing to compare to live music, there just isn't anything.

All the music you've ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head. I don't reject that, I use it.

Music evokes so many feelings in us, memories, nostalgia, things that are connected to our past.

Not to deny that it is a thinking people's music, but when I listen to music if I ever catch myself thinking, I'm in trouble--I know something is wrong.

In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

You can't sing about love unless you know about it.

Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing.

I think music as we know it, is autobiographical.