Yo-Yo Ma Quotes

There's a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they've been wearing.

I'd say that it's important for music to be there that gives you a challenge, that rearranges things in your head.

Music is about listening, the more you play, the more the magic spreads.

With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.

Human beings evolved opposable thumbs for a reason. The sense of reward you get from making something with your hands can't be earned any other way. It's obvious that people learn faster from 'hands-on' experience than they do watching someone else do something.

It's the things that you notice when you're not actually with your instrument that, in fact, become so interesting, and that you - you want to explore, through this tiny tiny surface of a drum.

A lot of times Mick will play me different things, or I'll listen to a cassette, and out of twenty ideas or whatever, I'll find two or three that are just blowing me away, and we'll start working on them right away.

When you're a little kid, you have nerve. I'd walk right up to whoever was recording and say, 'Hey, dude, what's the lick of the week?'

The goal of serious musicians is to play outside of yourself. That's most likely with people who suggest things that are outside your musical experience.

But I could not imagine having a child and the child not having a relationship with music that opens up their mind and their imagination and teaches them things.

When you get new people around you, the excitement is new because they have different take on your music. They play it in a different way, and that's always exciting to be around. It elevates everybody onstage.

I must have been five or six when I realised all the stuff I was writing made sense with what I was playing on the piano.

I think that's really important, that kids get exposed to music as soon as they can - not necessarily to become musicians, but at least have an outlet. It's an art form that's easily accessible to young ears.

It's all background experience and listening and exposure. That's why it's so important for people today and during any time to expose your children to lots of different kinds of things.

When you touch me there, honey, makes my blood perspire, you got my body flaming like a California fire. Pulsing, pounding, pushing no longer in control, heatwave in my brain, smolder in my soul.

Then how can you ever know about the beautiful goodness of Mud? How bad it wants to be things. How bad it wants to get on your legs and arms and take your footprints and handprints and how bad it wants you to make it alive! Mud is always ready to play with you. Seriously you should try it!

I think I find tactile things, you know. Just the feeling of blood itself is enough for me. If you, even if it's not real blood. I mean that's enough, like sometimes there are very simple things that are enough.

I've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like jazz needs a big-ass slap.

We should learn to think with our fingers.

If we allow our one-and-a-half year old to "help" us fold laundry he will learn something about buttons, zippers, snaps, where things go, the physical properties of cloth, what happens when you drop it, how easy or hard it is to carry compared with everything else he has ever carried, what clean clothes smell like, how a big towel can turn into a small bundle, how the small bundle you just folded can turn into a big towel again, plus any songs we care to sing or stories or related or unrelated facts we care to pass on.

Music was not a big deal to me when I was in middle school. And then I slowly became a big jazz fan. Even more than concerts, a lot of my high school time was spent going to jazz clubs in the city.

The more I can learn about music, the more I learn about other things.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited. That gives me energy to want to make new things, and it forces me to hear things in new ways, which then can only help to say things in a new way.

Music education can help spark a child's imagination or ignite a lifetime of passion. When you provide a child with new worlds to explore and challenges to tackle, the possibilities are endless. Music education should not be a privilege for a lucky few, it should be a part of every child's world of possiblity.

Those people that don't see the power in art maybe have never been a part of an art, in a real way. To experience it, and to see and witness how it affects people, we're not doing it just to create professionals. It's to add another dimension to the way that children think and the way they experience certain things. If you didn't have dance, music and singing, it just seems so odd to me.