Adnan Sami Quotes

I like to stick with music I know I can play. I love classical, but I don't think I could ever play it. I'm just not qualified.

I've paid my dues in the classical trenches.

I played piano growing up. I played classical piano since I was 5, and I sang in choirs, and I sang in plays and musicals.

As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n' roll and jazz standards.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

When I was younger, studying classical music, I really had to put in the time. Three hours a day is not even nice - you have to put in six.

I've always said that I count myself as a classical crossover artist. To be so, you have to have the core classical training, which I did for many, many years, but also be interested in the pop side of things. You can fit in somewhere in the middle. I feel I do that really well.

I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.

Even though I'm a jazz-trained drummer, I cut my teeth playing rock.

Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.

As a piano player, if 10 is concert level, I'd put myself at a 5 or a 6, but in a completely different genre than classical or opera. In terms of classical and opera, playing accompaniment, I'd say I was a 3.

I trained at Juilliard so that I could do all kinds of genres, so that's what I'm trained to do.

A lot of people ask how I ended up doing classical music given that I'm in a rock band. The truth is that it's the other way around. I was trained as a classical musician and then started playing in a rock band later.

I think, until I was 16, classical music had just seemed like a little bit of a rhythmic wasteland for me. Coming from bluegrass, where one conducts oneself rhythmically, it seemed like such a different approach, and at that point the difference that I was noticing was a real turn off to me.

I was introduced to classical music by my grandparents - my parents were mostly into folk and jazz. Even as a young man, I was literally unaware of the distinctions between any of that, and I still think it's pointless.

Music has influenced everything from my tattooing to how I talk to how I walk, I guess. I was classically trained in piano since I was 6. Then in my teens, my older sister introduced me to Metallica. It was all over. I had a mohawk soon after that.

Ah, it's awesome learning about theater, but it's a completely different musical landscape from rock and roll.

I was brought up by my mother, and she is my guru in classical singing. I have trained primarily under her.

A lot of music that's my favorite doesn't sound like the music I write.

Classical music gives musicians a kick. But African music gives everyone a kick.

I never called myself a jazz singer. I just call myself a vocalist because I love to sing all kinds of things.

As a writer, I've always been the sum total of my influences, and those are all over the spectrum: Rachmaninov, the Who, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore, Burt Bacharach and Leonard Bernstein, the Rolling Stones and the Small Faces.

I studied and sang lot of jazz when I was growing up. I think that plays a little bit into some of the things I do vocally, notes that I pick in chords.

My initial training was on the keyboard - mainly the great American songbook. In junior high, during the day, I was a classical clarinetist, but after school, I played New Orleans jazz and big-band music.

I grew up in a family that was very musical, learned the blues and everything like that. And I became a little bit frustrated with the simplicity of rock n' roll and blues. I started listening to a lot of classical music - mainly Bach, Vivaldi.