John Philip Sousa Quotes

Music is universal too. Even deaf people like to dance, love rhythm, and can kind of pick it up.

Rock and roll music, if you like it, if you feel it, you can't help but move to it. That's what happens to me. I can't help it.'

In fact, jazz has such a great feeling and great emotional content that it really doesn't require you to have technical understanding of it. I think you just have to allow your feelings to go with the music and you will find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

I make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure or sensuality. It makes people move their feet and shake their bodies. That's what music does.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

I'm a firm believer that embracing the imperfections of making music is so much of what makes something groove. Getting rid of these imperfections runs the risk of removing a lot of the magic that makes this music really special, and diminishes music's ability to connect with us as human beings. We are all imperfect, after all.

It's hard to explain music when it goes in your gut and makes left and right and turns and moves you and resonates with you.

It's fun to move people musically.

When I'm playing with my band, I designate different parts to feel different things. The bass pounds in your chest when you go to a concert. It almost replaces your heartbeat. Then the drums you feel on the floor.

If you're a lay person listening to jazz, you don't necessarily understand everything that's happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you're getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

Music's something you feel. You have to feel it first before you hear it.

The stuff that I dig, it's usually got a soulful component to it. A singer that I really like. I might not understand the language that they're singing in, but I'm really communing with this person.

Vivid images are like a beautiful melody that speaks to you on an emotional level. It bypasses your logic centers and even your intellect and goes to a different part of the brain.

Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

When Marvin Gaye made his music, he evoked this feeling that would reach everybody.

I don't claim to be a great vocalist, but I know how to work my voice with its limitations. My talent is I know how to work what I have. It might not always be a picture-perfect performance, but what we look for is the emotion.

It's as if my left heel is my bass drum and my right heel is the floor tom-tom. I can get snare out of my right toe by not putting it down on the floor hard, and, if I want cymbals, I land flat on both feet, full strength on the floor.

I listen to a lot of songs, and they aren't talking about anything. I don't connect with them. I'll listen to something like Musiq Soulchild's 'Just Friends,' and I'm like, 'Wow, I really feel what he's talking about.' That's how I want people to feel about my music.

I hate it when people try to explain music. The best thing about music is that it's invisible. If you make a song and someone is like, 'Explain it,' and you explain the message, it's like - poof. It all crashes down.

When it comes down to it, it's all about good music and what makes people react. That wins over everything else.

That's the ideal to me - to make music that is well-crafted and sophisticated technically, but has a soul and a heart that touches a lot of people.

Playing the sax and then enjoying jazz music, man - it's like I learned how to find words inside of the beat.

There is no such thing as human perfection, and yet when you hear Lataji sing, you wonder how she sang that song so beautifully, so perfectly. Or, how Kumar Gandharva touched your soul so powerfully.

You cannot have black music without something soulful in it, whether it's lyrically, how it's performed, or how it's expressed.