"What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose."
Music quotes
Music
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Music quotes (page 36 of 156)
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"I think all music is a gift from God."
"Yet half the beast is the great god Pan, To laugh, as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man. The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain-- For the reed that grows never more again As a reed with the reeds of the river."
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"
"Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Merle Haggard, Hank Williams. All of them are different styles, but those are the songs that make the times. They're the songs that last through time."
"Miles Davis was a master. In every phase of his career, he understood that this music was a tribute to the African muse."
"There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated, totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument."
"I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex."
"If a man is not good, what has he to do with the rules of propriety? If he is not good, what has he to do with music?"
"You could listen to Woody Guthrie songs and actually learn how to live."
"All dese governments and dis this and that, these people that say they're here to help, why them say you cannot smoke the herb? Herb... herb is a plant, you know? And when me check it, me can't find no reason. All them say is, 'it make you rebel'. Against what?"
"We JAH people can make it work."
"All I try to do is write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it."
"As far as music school goes, I walked through Berkelee one time."
"I never believed in a set routine. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel."
"I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded Muses tell me what I must write, and elegiac verses bathe my face with real tears. Not even terror could drive from me these faithful companions of my long journey. Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age."
"Jazz is America's classical music."
"The thing that is making jazz healthy today is that people are coming out of other backgrounds - from rock, folk, from ethnic music. It's changing the music, and for the better."
"... all of the great sounds that James Burton and Jimmy Bryant were getting, came out of Telecasters"
"Then the singing enveloped me. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone's very heart. There was no sense of performance or judgment, only that the music was breath and food."