Buddy Rich Quotes

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

I'm singing what I want to sing based on the emotion of what that day feels like. That's what comes out of my mouth and guitar. That impacts people. They know anything can happen.

So, to come In with a set routine it's something I've never believed in. It should depend on how you feel, because you play what you feel.

What I'm trying to do is just sing what comes to my body in the context of the song. And if you go by the emotion of the song, it's almost like stepping into a city. Cities have certain customs and rules and laws you can break, and that's what I was doing.

Don't use your brain to play it, let your feelings guide your fingers.

I believe in the autobiographical concept only to the degree that I am able to put onto film all that's passing through my head at the moment of shooting.

Anything human can be felt through music, which means that there is no limit to the creating that can be done with music. You can take the same phrase from any song and cut it up so many different ways - it's infinite. It's like God... you know?

I love music. I do play. It's like mathematics, and it's also emotional. It's nice to play, for no other reason than just to play.

For myself music definitely informs my emotions. And I can literally play a song that will get me where I need to be emotionally. I don't have to think about the tragic things that happened in my life or the greatest things that happened in my life.

I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.

Music comes first from my heart, and then goes upstairs to my head where I check it out.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.

Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building.

Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Lack of feeling in an emotional sense is responsible for the way some singers do our songs. They don't understand and are too old to grasp the feeling. Beatles are really the only people who can play Beatle music.

... We borrowed it all from Coltrane. I started encouraging everybody in the band to listen to John Coltrane - 'Check it out, see what these guys do.' They take one chord, the tonic chord, and just play all over it. 'We can do that too!' I wanted to make our music something really amazing - I wanted it to be jaw-dropping and turn on a dime and do all of those things that I knew music could do, and nobody told us we couldn't do it. I shouldn't say 'I,' though - Jerry Garcia was behind it the whole way.

Music is the can-opener of the soul.

I love the opportunity to tell the story about the characters through the music.

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

The youngsters coming up now just go through the motions necessary to make the play. They should bounce around a little, show some life and zip. It adds a little action and gives the fans something to look at rather than the monotonous routine, no matter how perfectly the play is made.

It's just about really being sensitive, and trying to play a music that is about music.

Music falls on the silence like a sense / A passion that we feel, not understand.

I play every day. It's like a habit for me now. I just, if I don't play, I kind of miss - something's off.