Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.
The pianist Cecil Taylor is extremely melodic; the guitarist Derek Bailey is extremely melodic, and Ornette Coleman.
I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.
There were two things I used to do to seduce girls: jokes and music. Since I'm not a great pianist, jokes were my thing.
Wladyslaw Szpilman: Its too small. There's 400,000 of us in Warsaw. Henryk Szpilman: No, there's 360,000. So it will be easy.
Father: Well, to tell you the truth, I thought it would be worse.
Wladyslaw Szpilman: What does my tie have to do with anything? I need it for work.
When a little more than a teenager, I was a piano-bar pianist in the land where I was born and raised, Tuscany.
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.
You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.
A punk concert isn't fun without a pit.
The live concert industry has become corporate-ized.
I didn't really buy LPs or go to concerts.
As a young pianist in Hollywood, I began orchestrating for others, and I just felt really comfortable doing that.
Originally I studied as a musician, a classical pianist. That was my career before I took up acting in my late 20s.
Pianists don't argue too much generally because we have such a hard time just getting things right; arguing is for string players.
Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.
We are the ones who take this thing called music and line it up with this thing called time. We are the ticking, we are the pulsing, we are underneath every part of this moment. And by making the moment our own, we are rendering it timeless. There is...
I say what's in my heart, and I do it in my concerts.
I daresay one good concert justifies a week of satisfaction at home.
The first concert I saw was Cheryl Wheeler.
