Evan Parker Quotes

When you try to put everything into music, there's no room left to try to make you think we're cool. We know you think we're cool.

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

But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.

I think every time you take on a new role, you're trying to help find that voice and you add your own bits and pieces along the way but with Noah [Baumbach] it's already done.

It's just about really being sensitive, and trying to play a music that is about music.

I actually think in music, learning technical stuff doesn't matter. You can be as technical as you like, but still sound awful.

On the show [the Voice] I obviously wasn't allowed [singing my own original music], because it's not that type of show. I think it's really cool that I get to do my own thing now.

I think jazz is a phenomenal creative force, because it's one man, one vote as you're playing, but it's a collective thing, what you're doing. You're listening to all the musicians around you and you're working within that structure.

I think when I feel I'm at my best is when I'm on stage, and it's my version of jazz because it's just riffing or something.

I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn...What comes out is what I feel.

I think once you've seen a song with a video, it limits your own mind's ability to read into it anything other than what you've seen.

The essential elements of singing are voice, musicianship, and story. It is the rare artist that has all three in abundance.

I don't think he (Joseph Albers, fh) ever realized that it was his discipline that I came for. Besides, my response to what I learned from him was just the opposite of what he intended.. ..I was very hesitant about arbitrarily designing forms and selecting colors that would achieve some predetermined result, because I didn't have any ideas to support that sort of thing - I didn't want color to serve me, in other words.

I do think it's a very good way to describe what a great actor does. You're both acknowledging the authority of the director and the necessity of the actor to push back and find their own voice.

It [voicing animation] is very freeing. Nobody in the cast is doing their voice. No one is talking like they normally talk and it's because, all of a sudden, you're freed from the physical limitations of how you look, which is amazing.

I Still Approach A Scene As One Would Approach A Guitar Solo. You Don't Exactly Know How You're Going To Phrase This Or That. Which I Think Is Beautiful. That Idea Of Chance.

I always want to do something that just sort of fits the mood. It's supposed to help the song, it's not supposed to take away from the song or re-contextualize it. I always feel like the less you make it a conceptual territorial debut, the better.

When the intellectual part of guitar playing overrides the spiritual, you don't get to extreme heights.

A pop song is a condensed version of a life in three minutes, whereas, when you go to write your prose, you have to find the rhythm in your words, and you have to find the rhythm in the voice that you have found and the way you're speaking.

I think minimalism is something I just got attracted to just in general because I like the empty space, if you think about it, like there's a lot of empty space. So there are sounds there, there are chords, like coordinates, to sort of tell you where the emotion is going, but then it leaves so much room for the voice to do other things.

Art is not nature... There was a lot more to be got out of color.

Personally, I think you can put any interpretation you want on anything, but when someone suggests that Can't Buy Me Love is about a prostitute, I draw the line. That's going too far.

I think that artists don't make art - the art makes itself through us. I'm not the doer. I'm just along for the ride. Acting really reminds me of that because I don't write the words; I don't make the decisions. That's the director. Narcissism is a tragic condition. It must be so miserable to live trapped in a reflection that only includes the smallest version of our identities. Our true identities should have no bounds and no limits.

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

An entertainer is someone who pleases others, and an artist tries to please himself. An artist is on a journey: they don't know where they're going, what is going to happen, but they know they are not there yet, and there is some continuity and growth. I think of myself as an entertainer: I'm a performing entertainer, I'm a stand-up comic. But there's an artist at work here, too. One who interprets his world through his own filter.