"They seemed to believe that since I had a record out I didn't need to do anything else. I don't understand that attitude at all. To me, being a musician is like being a doctor: You've got to keep up with all the changes, and the more you learn about your profession, the better off you are."
~ Tony Williams
"Everybody talks about Lifetime being the first fusion band, but it was really sort of a throwback to what was going on when I started out in Boston."
~ Tony Williams from his last interview
"If there are any obvious influences, they would be Aaron Copland, Gershwin, Elgar and 19th-century composers in that vein."
~ Tony Williams
"I think the problem with a lot of the fusion music is that it's extremely predictable, it's a rock rhythm and the solos all play the same stuff and they play it over and over again and there's a certain musical virtuosity involved in it."
~ Ken Burns
"I think my playing has been orchestral throughout the years, and this is another way of expressing that. But I primarily see it as the ultimate accomplishment of a musician. Composing makes me feel like I've finally gotten all the way up the ladder as a musician."
~ Tony Williams
"I've studied all my musical life, but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it."
~ Tony Williams
"People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?...It’s just not right. It’s not right. It’s not, it’s not going to change anything. We’ll, we’ll get our justice....Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out."
~ Rodney King, spoken on May 1, 1992, Day 3 of the L.A. Riots
“Only your notes are pure contraption
Only your song is an absolute gift”
~ W.H. Auden from "The Composer"
"But first and foremost is creating the foundation. It's great to play a lot of fast lines, and melodic ideas, but if the foundation is not there, it can jeopardize the solidity of the entire ensemble."
~ Jimmy Haslip
"Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian, Jimmy Raney, Wes Montgomery in fact most of the great guitar players; I loved them all. The newer guys: John McLaughlin, Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Scott Henderson and Frank Gambale... They're all amazing with very different musical personalities. Of course there's Michael Brecker and Keith Jarrett, but they don't play the guitar (thank God!). I think I've been influenced by all instruments. I was influenced a lot by horn players, from Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderly, John Coltrane on to Michael Brecker. There's many, many more that you could fill this whole page with people that have brought great gifts to the world of music."
~ Allan Holdsworth on his influences
"Not only today but when I was in school, it was crucial to become a composer and to really hone your compositional skills, 'cause you never knew when that was going to benefit you. It could happen at any time."
~ Alan Pasqua on teaching music at USC
"I guess the beauty of it for me is that my jazz improvisation class is improvisation for me too as the teacher, in terms of I have to improvise on the curriculum that I've developed on a weekly basis to make determinations and assessments on what strengths I hear and see and areas that need to be worked on. So it's really fantastics. And it's fresh for me, you know, I don't get — there's no boredom factor 'cause I can't rest on anything. We have just certain areas that we're going to touch upon but we don't know when it's going to happen. And it's great. They really respond to that kind of spontaneity. We work on a very open and trusting environment."
~ Alan Pasqua on teaching improvisation at USC
"One of the things I that notice about the young improviser that comes to school is that they deal pretty much chord to chord to chord to chord. So it's the train instead of the express. Not so much Charlie Parker versus Lester Young — not so much vertical playing versus horizontal playing — but just really they're immersed in being able to improvise from one chord to the next, which is what you have to be able to do. At some point, if you really learn the piece well enough, and you become intuitive with it. You can look at the sheet, but you're not seeing chord to chord but you're seeing bigger shapes of the song and you will start to improvise — even though you may be playing chord to chord — you will actually improvising on more shapes of the melody, more structure of the piece of music. So I encourage looking at music in that way, not just to get hung up on a tempo or how many chords that there are but really look at what the piece is made of like melodically right away. What are the notes? What are the intervals? Is there a pattern? Is there something? What makes this song the song? There's something about this piece of music that makes it what it is, that makes it unique. That's what I try to encourage people to embrace and to elaborate on. So it's almost a very organic way if you will of looking at music and embellishing it, as opposed to — I don't personally teach licks or patterns. I'm not a pattern player like that, but I like more to the emotion and the melody and how it all interacts."
~ Alan Pasqua on teaching improvisation at USC
"Any odd time signature has combinations of 2 and 3 counts – for example, if you play in 5/8, then you can count it in 2/8 plus 3/8, or reverse it - 3/8 plus 2/8. The composition determines the 2 and 3 counts. The first counts (the 1s) are accented and these accents define the groove. If you think in that way, it's easy to understand: 2+3+2+3+3 would be called 13/8, but since you know where the accents fall, you can make it groove. You can write a sticking patter for a 2 count, then one for a 3 count and connect them together. Bass drum plays the accents of all the downbeats. From there you can edit notes out, experiment with half time, etc…it's endless. The goal is to make music out of it, not to make it sound difficult."
~ Chad Wackerman
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