Himesh Reshammiya Quotes

I don't sit down to write a song, per se.

There are thousands of ragas, and they are all connected with different times of the day, like sunrise or night or sunset. It is all based on 72 of what we call 'mela' or scales. And we have principally nine moods, ranging from peacefulness to praying, or the feeling of emptiness you get by sitting by the ocean.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

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.

In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.

Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting.

Composing is what I love most from what I do. Each genre has a unique expression that you cannot supplant with another. All the records co-inspire each other though they are not tied conceptually in any way to another.

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.

Every time I sit down in front of my piano, I like to improvise with the instrument. It depends on my mood of that day what kind of melodies and rhythms I am playing around. Sometimes, even before starting to play I already have a quite clear picture of a song I would like to compose, or at least the sound of it.

I am a trained singer in Hindustani and classical music.

Someone like my father will improvise as much as 90% of the music in concert, but with me it's maybe 10 to 20%. It's sort of the test of how great someone is, the more they can improvise correctly and still be true to the raga they're playing, and still keep it new and fresh the whole time.

I suppose it never occurs to these people that a man might just want to write a piece of music.

I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.

I would say that the most complex style of singing comes from India. Real, classical Indian music produces probably the best technical and natural singers in the world, just because the patterns and the inflection are so complex in how the style moves and what it requires vocally. I think the best classical singers come from India.

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Indian classical music is charming and currently there are a wide range of musicians who bring great classical tunes to the Bollywood industry.

There's so many different ways to play Mozart.

Music is a living art. You re-create it.

If I want to take a particular form of blues somewhere else I have the equipment to do it but I never even thought of it.

When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.

I have not made many conscious efforts to "re-imagine" songs. I just let them happen the way they're going to happen.

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.