Twyla Tharp Quotes

Find someone you can jam with. That's a big deal. When you play with someone else, you gotta work together to get the thing started and in time, working and in the groove.

Then certainly for a musician timing becomes something that is immediately accessible as a concept, because it's a necessity in ones everyday performance.

Yes, I'm a musician. I also like to play with others, sometimes more, sometimes less.

I just wanted to say one more thing: I also think that when you go to play music, you're there to play music.

Interplay and interaction are the integral parts of music - they're as important as the notes.

When you play with another piano player, it's just second nature to play the parts that need to be played.

To do a comedy team, it requires so much extracurricular stuff, so much compromise, so much intuitiveness to know what the other guy is doing. That's why it's so hard to do it.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

Music is pretty intimate stuff and I can only work with very few people: Gonzalez being one, Mocky being another and, on a completely different level, Broken Social Scene. With Broken Social Scene it's not one-on-one, it's a one-on-12. It's very healthy, very comfortable, like a big pot luck supper among old friends.

We would play, then they would play a set, then we would jam on the last song.

Timing has a lot to with art.

I really enjoy creating music onstage, to participate in making music live.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

And I've also come to the conclusion that, as far as guitar solos and things like that are concerned, it's more important to complement the music rather than take away from it.

A bass player has to think and play like a bass player. A drummer has to play and think like a drummer, and stay out of the way of the vocalist. The guitar player has to respect everybody else.

All you have to do is play one note. But it needs to be the right note.

That said, everything's important, and every musician who plays on the record is an integral part of it.

After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.

Ben was more improvisational, and relied less on methodology, and basically is a guitarist who switched to bass, whereas Jeff has a more traditional approach to playing bass in a band, and has a great sense of what his band sounds like, and we lock up nicely.

I like to listen to my iPod and also play music. I've been doing percussion since I was eight or nine. Rhythm is crucial in long jump but also in life.

I mean, the great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them.

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.

The orchestra confides in me about their music director or their conductor, and I've never seen a conductor that's been liked by everyone.

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.