Quotes About Music

Classical music's ability to translate emotional themes is fantastic.

I'd listen to all the stuff that was going on around me and drift off into my fantasies about it. My fantasies have fuelled all the songs I've ever written.

I'm only involved really right now with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Brass Fantasy.

... where I walked, the frost shaped itself to my will, dancing in the air like music over water.

Women, music, beer, and pie. Rurik, you're just an all-American guy.

The piano by its black and white keys always attracted me, my father showed me how to use... and slowly I got into playing.

I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.

Every one of my father's songs is a lesson.

My father was a stone mason, and a talented amateur pianist and vocalist.

My father moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn and my mother came there as a child from the Philippines. They met at a show where my dad was playing percussion. My mom was a hula dancer.

I was just studying with my father, a very difficult task for me since he was a great, great Qawwali singer.

I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.

My father was a very disciplined singer who worked hard at his craft, and I was around that growing up.

I met Leo Fender, who is the guru of all amplifiers, and he gave me a Stratocaster. He became a second father to me.

I suppose my father was more influential in my starting to play the guitar.

One encounters very capable fathers abashed by their piano-playing daughters. Three measures of Schumann make them red with embarrassment.

My father's record collection was all country. That's how I was exposed to it.

My father ran the gamut: a favorite of his was Josef Hofmann, but there was also Friedman, Rachmaninoff, Godowsky, Lhevinne, Moiseiwitsch, Paderewski, etc.

My father had a varied ear, from Hank Williams to Ravel.

My father bought me a little cardboard accordion, and when I was three I got this little machine.

I know what tablas sound like, because my father played a lot of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan.

Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes.

I was musically baptized by the black founding fathers of rock-and-roll, and like all real music lovers, the music changed, enriched, upgraded and fortified our lives forever.

I feel that through my father's music I've found my own voice in my own playing.