I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
I was looking for some way to put my music to some service on a nightly basis. You go into a town, you play a little music, you leave something behind. That idea connected us to the local community. It was a very simple idea, but it really resonated ...
If you ever go to a music session, you'll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they're reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to direc...
When you start playing music when you're quite young, it's easy to stay young. And then you're touring, and you see people who've been on the road for 10 or 15 years and they just haven't grown up at all.
A hundred years ago, concerts were far more come-what-may - people played cards, drank beer and appreciated the music. If we go some way towards restoring that spirit, I'll be happy.
I have a company in New York City producing music for commercials, for radio, TV, features, etc. That's how I've been making my living. And now the company is very successful - to the extent that I can afford to come out and play.
It's glorious to be able to go onto the Internet and hear any kind of music anywhere, from anywhere, and get it instantly. But there's also something glorious about having a record with a sleeve and looking at the artwork, putting it on the turntable...
I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it'd take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn't want to retreat.
We're real people and we're a band that's been playing on the scene for a long time. We've made a lot of friends, and one enemy we've always had was the NME. They've always basically slated us and they've basically never ever written about the music.
It's such a cliche thing to say. I want to choreograph, I want to direct, I want to act, I want to write music, I want to play music, I want to sing. For me, it's never-ending. I want to do it all, really.
The kids that are making the ghetto stuff I can't even reach are the ones that are inspiring me to play music for the other kids in the city they don't even know about. If I don't get those kids making music, there won't be an original kid DJing like...
When I'm writing, I'm thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don't translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.
During the time that my recording career seemed to be in a slump a music called disco came on the scene and literally took over radio stations as well as having radio stations created to play it which sort of negated my music as well as that of some ...
You'd go in, read the script once for timing and then you would sit around and play games. The sound effects people would come in and we would do a dress rehearsal so they could get the effects and the music cues in place. Then you would wait until y...
I found L.A. much less responsive to the name Juilliard than New York was. In New York, that name actually means something. People will look up from their desks when you walk in. In L.A. it's, 'Oh yeah, that's a music school. What do you play?'
I do know many a band out there, because believe me, we've played with most of them, who are together because they have to be. They might not talk to each other offstage, but they realize they can earn a living by going out and keeping that music ali...
I was a quiet, nerdy kid living in the Bronx. I spent most of my teens in my room, taking apart electrical items to figure out how they worked before putting them back together, and listening to the music my four older sisters and parents played.
I don't want to be classified as an old-skool DJ or new-skool DJ. I want to be classified as an all-skool DJ who plays it all. I also want to learn to DJ house music in my own fashion.
You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.
Being on 'Nashville' and working with some incredible people like T-Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller - so many wonderful, incredible musicians that I've been blessed to play with and observe - that has continued to shape the process of arranging music, ...
