Herb Alpert Quotes

Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.

That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

So the actual riffing came out of us just sitting there and doing it the way I think some people think we really did it, which is all spontaneously, and it really was.

I kind of make music where and when I can, and I guess that's why I collaborate so much.

I like to be sort of grounded with Fish. But, at the same time, I think probably what's unique about us is the way other dynamics happen, where I'll play off Trey for awhile. When we start playing a jam, I don't usually know what's going to happen, I don't have a plan.

There is no blood in jazz drumming, and there are no bullies in jazz drumming.

Most of the musicians I play with - aside from the form and structure of the music - the interpretation is up to them.

Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

I just start singing some words with a tune. I don't ever write a song thinking, Now I'll write a song about... .

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments & collectively create a thing of beauty.

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline.

Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.

The theory is that you don't play a song the same way twice because it's jazz. That's where I'm coming from.

Jazz is not background music.

I get so much energy and I learn so much through collaborating with other people. Ultimately, I think the best music will always be created through collaborations - pooling together skills to create something bigger than any individual. I like to use my own SOPHIE material to present ideas in their most extreme, un-compromised form. I really use those opportunities to express exactly where I'm at in terms of production and writing ideas, as a document of my thoughts and feelings, as well.

I think I learned a lot about collaboration and about joint creativity with other people. It is honestly so much fun and I don't think that I would have had the same album if I had just written it by myself.

I think that some of the best Crowes stuff we did had that spontaneous vibe. Thats something thats always interested me in music. Im not really the kind of person to get too bogged down in the details. I think that takes away from the emotion and the vibe of what youre doing.

I like little collaborations where the other thing happens, where it's half-baked or it's improvised, and let's develop it together. "What do you want to wear? Do you have an idea?" All that's fun to do, and I like that, but it doesn't take anything away.

If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

When we have a brilliant idea, instead of making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves.

That's why I don't rehearse a lot and why I shoot a lot immediately. I have ideas of where I'd like to take the character, but we both end up going together.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

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.