Stanley Jordan Quotes

Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is the only musician who had as much knowledge asgenius, and as much genius as knowledge.

Mozart was very much an arrested adolescent.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Mozart had a tremendously fertile and creative ear for a catchy tune.

Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.

I'm not trying to overcome my father or fill his shoes or reach any kind of level that he did. We're talking about a Mozart of rock music.

My harmony is passable but is usually made more eloquent at the hands of Steve Hamilton.

There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.

The guy that I worked on 'Thriller ' was a genius and he was 20 years old, but it was like working with a gifted 10-year-old. The guy who I worked on with 'Black Or White' was crazy. Michael had gone mad.

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.

I had studied piano since I was 13, but I was surrounded by students who'd been playing since they were 5. I realized I was never going to be anything but mediocre.

I think Jerry Lee is sad. As a musician, he was far more talented than Elvis Presley. Everybody down in Memphis knows that. Elvis became a movie star because he was beautiful. Not that Elvis wasn't talented, but Jerry Lee Lewis was incomprehensibly talented as a musician.

My wife is an incredible pianist. I don't think there's anything my wife can't do, in all actuality.

Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gifted artist of the rock era. Not the greatest genius - just the most musical in the broadest sense.

My big brother Ryan was funny and unfailingly kind. He was one of the most talented musicians you might encounte, and had a prodigious ability to pick up any instrument and play it by ear within the span of a single day.

It seems like if they'd given Bob Dylan a pen and paper in the cradle that he would've come up with a great song. I'd love to write songs like that.

We're the most talented musical island ever.

I like songs to mean something as well as sound good, and Paul Simon is a maestro. While Art Garfunkel was a voice and moved on to other things Simon remained the genius lyricist and composer.

When you're a kid, Beethoven is Beethoven, but as I've grown older, my astonishment at the sheer inventiveness of the man has increased, and I have an appreciation that I didn't have when I was in my 20s.

Merle Haggard once said, 'I'm really mad at Glen Campbell because he's the most talented human being in the world.' That kind of summed it up. Merle didn't miss!

I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son (W A Mozart)is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition.

Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.