Bill Bruford Quotes

Once you start to play together, vibing off each other in the scene, it's not just the notes - it's the music. The script might be the notes playing, but we're making it music.

Yeah, improvising only really works 100% when you're with somebody.

I think music naturally wants to be played with more than one person. There's a surprise element, and you don't know what it will be, and it's up to that other person's energy to help create this third thing.

My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music.

I enjoyed so much working with the guys from Wilco, and riffing off of them, and having someone come up to me with ideas, because normally in the studio it's me who has to come up with all the ideas.

I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.

I really challenge every actor at the beginning of a process, and I always say, 'I have an idea that I'm going to bring to the table. I hope and expect that you will have an idea and bring it to the table. But the way I really want to work is that together we're going to have a third idea that is better than either of our ideas.'

But I just think we've got such a continuity with what we're doing that most people come in and fill in the blanks. And sometimes we leave a lot of blanks to be filled.

Even though I have often recorded alone, I still feel the best music is made by musicians playing off each other.

I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.

I cannot exist as a solo artist.

Everything I do is collaborative. It's just my way. I'm really very interested in how the other musicians perceive the song.

Find someone you can jam with. That's a big deal. When you play with someone else, you gotta work together to get the thing started and in time, working and in the groove.

I have always needed other musicians to bounce off.

I've tried to force a solo before, but sometimes it's like, 'That thing don't really fit, man!'

'Heartless' is something Ann and I wrote together.

It's fun for musicians to step into each other's world. It's like different football teams - it's the same game but a different play.

When you improvise alone, you don't risk a lot, but doing an improvisation when you are two is even more difficult because you need to listen exactly to understand what is going to happen.

Two people making a beat is really like one person making a beat. But you have another person's brain. So what might sound good to you, they could flip it a different way. It's really a collaborative effort, really.

With me and Timbaland, we would always be at the studio, but working separately. He would be doing his thing with the beats and I would be doing my thing writing and then we would both come together and say 'OK, you add this to it and I'll add that to it.'

That's what music-making is: a dialogue.

As a professional, you pick up ideas from your colleagues and the orchestras you work with, while coming up with mutual interpretations in very short periods of time.

When you play with another piano player, it's just second nature to play the parts that need to be played.

If I hear music that has a hole in it and has a space for me to fit in, I go for that stuff.

I love seeing people collaborate to make great music!