James Taylor Quotes

Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.

Fortunately, I started very young, so I read music very well. And my favorite composers to play are Brahms and Mozart.

You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.

In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.

Yesterday I was playing Beethoven's fifth, because I love that.

You can sightread better if you know your scales and arpeggios.

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

We've been performing with symphonies all of our career and it sounds so wonderful when they play 'My Girl' with the large string section, I want to turn around and look.

Mostly I play with records. I play with my friend Bill Evans.

I'm very proud of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I got a classical piano training when I was little, and we also had music study lessons where we'd have to listen to a lot of classical music.

Improvisation is an important part of bluegrass, and I would hasten to add that classical music wasn't always such an improvisational void. Back in the day, everyone's cadenzas were improvised, and improvisation was taught in conservatories.

When I heard Coleman Hawkins, I learned to play ballads

I've never approached classical music in a formal way, ever. I couldn't read very well. I'd have to play every piece and internalize it, almost as if I had written it myself.

I play classical music almost exclusively. I never mastered jazz or gospel in the way that my mother did. She was a fine improvisational musician. I pretty much have to stick to what's written on the page.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

I never had any lessons. When I first started playing I used to read music. I was very interested in music. But when I started playing in groups I did a silly thing and dropped it. It's great if you can write things down.

Bizet was a very young man when he composed this symphony, so play it softly.

I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.

When it comes to songs and music, yeah, people love to sing and dance and play music and tunes, and that stream of consciousness that exists in music, nobody knows where that comes from.

Most of the soloists at Birdland had to wait for Parker's next record in order to find out what to play next. What will they do now?

There's nothing wrong with an actor that can't improvise, but if you're going to improvise, you gotta make sure you got people that can play the game.

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.

My grandfather and my father disagreed about music, not least of all because my dad wanted to improvise. It wasn't just that he wanted to play different music; it was just that he came off the dots.