Al Jarreau Quotes

Technology has made music accessible in a philosophically interesting way, which is great. But on the other hand, when everybody has the ability to make magic, it's like there's no more magic - if the audience can just do it themselves, why are they going to bother?

I don't go around, the way many musicians do, with earbuds in my ear listening to my iPod all day and just sticking my head in the music all the time.

I don't even listen to music when I'm off tour.

I know so few people who actually give music their undivided attention, so I've been trying to just park myself on the couch between the speakers and listen.

I don't listen to a lot of music; I write more music than I listen to, for sure.

Records were vitally important to the development of music and of all music cultures. With that being pushed by the wayside, I can't see an iPod uniting us. In fact it separates us, the streets are full of people bumping into lamp posts, listening to their own little universe, and there's no sharing in that.

I don't listen to music, actually. Obviously I go to clubs; I stand in elevators; a lot of my friends are musicians; I hear music all the time. But I don't have my own collection of music.

People are used to seeing kids jump around. You know, the target audience, the audience that's spending money on music, like rock and hip-hop - they're used to seeing people get really physically involved in their music.

A lot of times good, pristine recordings prevent the listener from getting emotionally involved in the music.

When recordings replaced concerts as the dominant mode of hearing music, our conception of the nature of performance and of music itself was altered.

But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.

I don't think people really do listen. We plug into music, and we have short attention spans. We tend to download individual tracks from iTunes rather than a whole album. We buy music DVDs and watch them once, and then they disappear into a drawer, or we loan them to a friend, and we never watch it again.

The biggest problem with American music right now, is that kids don't listen. They come by it honestly, Americans don't listen anyway. When people go to concerts, they say I'm going to see... not, I'm going to hear.

For many, an album is no longer a considerable feat of an artist but just sounds to be half-listened to while one is halfheartedly engaged in something else.

Music to me was never something that I could listen to while reading a book. Especially when I was studying music, if I was going to listen to music, I was going to put on the headphones or crank the stereo, and by God, I was going to sit there and just listen to music. I wasn't going to talk on the phone and multitask, which I can't do anyway.

Ninety percent of the time, when I put on my headphones, I forget to turn on my music. Literally 10 minutes will go by before I realize that there's no music.

We always focus on the quality of music because as long as the content is good, then the interest will be there.

When we talk about music, we tend to place our experiences into one of two categories: making the music and listening to it. Delineating the two seems practical and obvious. In reality, though, there are a lot of opportunities for overlap, and it doesn't matter how you get into the music as long as you connect with it.

I never wanted to be called a fan, and that's no disrespect to any artist who calls them fans, but I never wanted a boundary in between the people listening to my music and me - for them to feel like I'm doing something that they can't do.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

I'm interested in a lot of different sounds and types of music.

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

I still tune in to the radio and listen to pop music and enjoy it as much as I ever have.

Some of us get a feeling when we hear music and we feel music, and you want to figure out how to continue to feel that.

I wanted contemporary music to be treated the same as the traditional repertoire - performed regularly by people who knew each other and the music. That is the way you convince an audience.