Don Ellis Quotes

What drew me to the violin was mastering the instrument technically, which I'm continuing to do. You want to push boundaries, to not always be in your comfort zone. If you don't, you get stale. So you have to find areas of growth.

After my second-to-last record, 'The Greatest', I had gone on tour for a while, and I didn't play an instrument for about five years. And I got kind of - it's not self-esteem or whatever, or anger toward myself - but disappointed in myself that I hadn't been challenging myself to learn musically.

I was a late bloomer, but I realised that people really liked it when I played blues scales and, with the piano, I had that insatiable need to prove myself.

I mean as long as I have been doing music I know I am only 30% of what I could be and want to be.

To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.

I got a chance to work with Miles Davis, and that changed everything for me, 'cause Miles really encouraged all his musicians to reach beyond what they know, go into unknown territory and explore. It's made a difference to me and the decisions that I've made over the years about how to approach a project in this music.

I had to be reminded that the guitar is infinite. It never stops teaching you, it never stops being difficult; there's an unlimited amount of things to learn, and you'll never master it.

I was messing around with the harmonica... but I was 13 before I got a real good note out of it.

The best way for me to teach myself an instrument is to just jam on it, and sound awful sometimes, and sound great other times.

It keeps my feet on the ground just making sure that I'm always trying to learn something new or trying to be a real guitar player.

Ideally, I'd really like to put my own stamp on things, but it takes years, you know, and you're constantly learning and studying and falling in and out with your instrument, learning different approaches and different attacks.

I became a singer and a songwriter by learning on the spot, so think I always need to be slightly out of my comfort zone when I do something. I've never stopped being experimental because that's how I started.

My playground as a musician is growing.

I love music - really a lot. That's why I do it. But mine just never makes it, to me. There's always something wrong with it, something I want to change. But I like that, because at least it keeps me looking, trying to find ways I can improve, which obviously are a lot.

If you go out and just play the old stuff and never write new stuff, you're not really a complete musician, you're a performer.

I love stretching myself musically.

Now, when we first started, I would be playing something good and then feel like I wasn't doing the right thing and launch into some idiotic cliche. Luckily for me, Bobby was patient.

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

You never learn everything on that guitar neck.

With Zeppelin, I tried to play something different every night in my solos. I'd play for 20 minutes but the longest ever was 30 minutes. It's a long time, but whenI was playing it seemed to fly by.

Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.

I feel like I introduce another level of my creative ability on every album.

Intense study with Indian musicians such as Gaurav Majumdar and Zakir Hussain has inspired me to rethink my view of instrumental sound.

Every time I write a song my approach changes.