Lionel Hampton Quotes

It's hard to make music when you're not excited about it. So trying new things and going for new things is something that I can enjoy doing.

I say most of my music is very trial-and-error.

It's cool to have instruments lying around because they give you different ideas.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

If you're always playing the correct notes, there's something wrong - you're not searching; you're not reaching for anything.

All of my solos were improvised initially - I would go in and get my bearings and see what I came up with.

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.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

Music is really all about experimentation and lots of trial and error. It's just mind-numbingly boring until you hit on something that works well.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

There is no such thing as a wrong note.

You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.

I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I never took music lessons. I was just playing around in front of the mirror and being silly, then suddenly I started making songs.

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.

I just play, and I'm always trying to write songs.

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

I don't work out a lead section and practice it for a day and then lay it down. I don't do that. The first time I do something I think is expressive or really cool, that's what's actually on the recording.

This band makes sure that we have whole sections of stuff that are free form so that they don't know what we are doing next, that is the fun part of playing. You are playing something that you haven't ever played before.

To keep creating something with this type of music, you have to take it out of the box.

Composing is my life blood.

We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design.

I love to get to that place where I don't know what kind of music I'm doing; I don't know if it's any good. I don't know if it's anything. It's a big question mark. The idea is to have interesting results. That's my bottom line.

And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.

I love to sing random stuff. That's exciting for me.