Stewart Lee Quotes

Most of the musicians I play with - aside from the form and structure of the music - the interpretation is up to them.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

I wouldn't be the same actor if I couldn't do theater.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

I like to listed to the adventurous guys - the Coltranes, Miles Davis, the guys who just let it loose.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

I love jazz and blues, where there's a structure, but a lot of the cool stuff is veering off the page and playing.

Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination.

The words are the important thing. Don't worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you've got a new tune.

They say that Jazz is back, and I don't think it's gone anywhere. But they say it's back.

There’s no preparation for poetry.

What is natural does not have to be a representation of something. I'm now working on a thing that is a reconstruction of a starry sky, and yet I'm making it without a given from nature. Someone who says he uses a theme from nature can be right, but also someone who says he uses nothing at all.

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.

Growing up playing jazz and improvising has had a big impact on me, and it translates into my music.

My son's a painter. All through school his teachers tell him he's a genius. I tell him to paint me an apple that looks like an apple before he paints me one that doesn't. Go where you can go, but start from someplace recognizable.

Museums are important. Design and art schools are important because they show how it should be done at the highest level of quality. Once people are exposed to quality, they recognize it right away and they appreciate it. People's tastes are changed by exposure to quality. Unless they can see it they can't want it. That's the brilliance of Apple - they provide quality in design.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

Jazz demands that you bring to it things that are valuable to you, that are personal to you.

The art of not playing in tempo--one has to learn it. And the art of not playing what is written on the printed paper.

Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature.

You can have an art experience in front of a Rembrandt... or in front of a piece of graphic design.

Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There-you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)

About 70 percent of everything is really sketched out on my keyboard beforehand, because I do want accidents to happen in the studio.