Quotes About Music

You got to play the flute as a flute, like that. You can't play like a tenor concept on soprano; it sounds wrong. But some guys do it, and they think it's O.K., but not so!

Only the French, I guess, really use tenor and alto to any great extent in the orchestra.

My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from... I love improvisational music.

When I sing, I want people to think only about the tenor and only about the music.

God smiled on me in every sense. I was born a tenor, and you know what that means. Tenors are a rare commodity.

I am a tenor buff. I hear myself.

When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.

I play saxophone, I play tenor sax.

I don't know what I was trying to get out of a tenor - but it never really satisfied me until one day I picked up my alto and I said, 'Where have you been?' and I said right here for now on!

The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing.

Bud Johnson, God rest his soul of fame, a tenor saxophonist. Bud was always a big, big, big booster of mine and he always when I first met Bud in Pittsburgh when he came through there, he heard me sing and he wanted me to come to Chicago.

I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.

I kinda always wanted to be a tenor player, but I'm a small guy, and tenor was just too big.

When I was in grade school and high school, I did a lot of chorale singing. And the chorus would be tenor, bass, and alto and soprano.

I'm a natural baritone, so I had challenges in that middle range, which would be that tenor area, singing in my natural voice. And I worked on that. But basically the falsetto thing, I didn't even know it was a falsetto until a music teacher commented on it, that I had a very nice falsetto. I didn't even know what it was. I said, 'Oh, OK.'

If you come on a band tense, you're going to play tense. If you come a little bit foolish, act just a little bit foolish, and let yourself go, better ideas will come.

If every song is in the past tense, that's a drag, so you have to predict the future.

We're in an age when everything's present tense. People don't know how to be still and surrender to the music.

Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.

Music is like a huge release of tension.

Some music will make you dance. Other music helps you release tension.

My course is about really working on a sheet of music. You work out the chords, which note complements the other, and how they will make the feeling of tension, the feeling of resolution. It's all about harmonization. That's more of the theory of notation and everything rather than practical. I don't play any instrument.

Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.