Horace Silver Quotes

Arriving at a simple piece of music is a very difficult balance because, in being simple, you could easily be banal, so maybe it's more difficult to write a simple piece of music than a 12-tone piece where no one understands exactly what it is about.

My policy is not how fast you play, it's not how much you play but it's what you play and where you play it ... play for the commercial side of the music ... the word I still use today is called "simplicity" .. it is so important that you use simplicity in your playing and in your music.

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

We're falling into a place where melody is somewhat lacking in music. Everybody feels like, okay, too much melody or too much harmony, and it kind of goes over people's heads; they don't understand it.

I don't think any of the early Romantic composers knew how to write for the piano... The music of that era is full of empty theatrical gestures, full of exhibitionism, and it has a worldly, hedonistic quality that simply turns me off.

Sometimes the simplest forms of music are the hardest to play. Especially for musicians that are accomplished.

I think that the melodic piece of the puzzle in music is the most esoteric and difficult to quantify.

My blues are so simple, but so few people can play it right

I started to notice that simpleness is divine. I think we all start trying to use very complex harmonies and rhythms and all that because of a certain kind of ambition. But I was always trying to create something simple.

Sometimes I have thought that a song should look disappointing on the page - a little thin, perhaps, a little repetitive, or a little on the obvious side, or a mixture of all of these things.

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.

Just because you know umpteen billion scales, it doesn't mean you have to use them all in a solo.

What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.

I never think my music isn't easy until I got to teach it to other people.

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they're on the positive side of things. It's not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.

It's not easy to play in a framework that requires simplicity and to tastefully find ways to interject the kind of freedom that we have in playing jazz.

With guitar riffs, we always look for something that 's a little bit special. We've always found that it is harder to come up with something that's nice and simple without getting something that's hard but easy.

I'm into the whole song-as-a-piece-of-music thing: if it literally doesn't call for it, if it already has enough stuff going on, then it's okay not to play a solo.

I'm definitely trying to make longer songs, but if it's short and good, I'm not going to do anything about it.

I'm not a total chump. I write stuff that's reasonably musically complex.

Our music is harder to play than it sounds. It's the small details you don't realize are there until you try and re-do it.

Our tunes aren't just sing-along tunes: they're very complex. After a few days of that, you gotta take a break.

There've been times on tour when people have said to us, 'Yeah, your band is really simple.' But it's really not.