Stanley Crouch Quotes

Songwriting is something I really need to work on. I don't have very many songs but I really love it. I would love to be a great song writer some day.

It was by listening to Goodman's band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.

Music is my passion. I've always been musically driven and musically inclined. I play the keyboard a little bit. I love listening to music and discovering music. That's my love, but I'm not a rapper at all.

He [Benny Carter] is all that every jazz musician the world over wants to be. He's performed 20,000 nights. How many shoes have been shined? How much mascara put on? Rouge? How many of those impossible bowties have been tied? How many love songs have been sung? How many dances have been danced? How many have passed to the sound of his music? It's been said that a man should not be forced to live up to his art. Benny Carter is one of the rare instances when we wonder whether the great art that a man has created can live up to him.

If you love music, than you can play music.

We should not compare humans to God, but Messi is a godly player.

In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music.

Actually, my ambition at eight or nine years old was to be one of Little Richard's sax players, and that's when I got my first saxophone, a Selmer. It was a strange Bakelite material - that creamy plastic with all the gold keys on it. I had to get a job as a butcher's delivery boy to start paying for it.

Lionel Messi is the best player ever.

You have to train your mind and your ears, but they're more like athletic skills. So, part of music you just have to learn those things or you can't practice the art.

"The way I feel about music -- any song, any style -- is that there is no right and wrong, only true and false. If the music and lyrics are conceived out of honesty and if the production of the song goes along with its original message, then what has been expressed is art, regardless of what anyone's opinion is of it. So things are a lots impler if you just tell the truth.

We're in this band, the Foo Fighters, making music for the love of music. We all came from bands that had disbanded, and we were drawn to each other because we missed playing.

[Jeffrey Lewis is] The best lyricist working in the US today.

Sad to hear Paul Scholes is retiring, great player, world class player, the English Zizou.

Footwork is one of the primary prerequisites to becoming a great player

Country music runs through my veins. I love it very much.

The notion of art as the dearly purchased outcome of an immense spiritual risk, one whose cost goes up with the entry and participation of each new player in the game.

Even from when Lionel Messi was very young I could see that he was a great player. A lot of people spoke about him, and then when I saw him myself for the first time I could see the amazing quality that he had. I didn't teach him anything - he had enough quality himself.

It's hard to play with a bagpipe player. It's like an exotic bird. I love the sound, it's like strangling a goose.

I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.

Messi, he's exceptional. When you watch him, you feel there's a child inside him and he is making some childhood dream come true. He's a Great Player, not only for today but also tomorrow.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music.

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around.

I love music, it's always been a big passion for me.

Messi is a genius. He has everything. When I watch him, I see a player who is very, very skilful, very clever and his left foot is like Diego Maradona's.