Allan Holdsworth Quotes

I'm going to keep evolving and evolving and showing people that progression is key when it comes to music.

I'm very much a traditionalist, but I think it's important to know about tradition so that you can evolve the music you are deciding to make.

I do not think that music keeps evolving. It evolved through Bach; since then, in my humble opinion, all the innovations added nothing.

I'm constantly on my toes and re-examining my own music.

New music is absolutely integral to classical music.

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.

Music should be pushed forward.

I feel like when you listen to music, it's almost like the same thing over and over, but of course as time goes on, rappers evolve, lyrical play evolves.

I am optimistic about the future of music.

Music is changing. I'm just doing what I'm doing, and hopefully in the next 20, 30 years, some kids can take what I'm doing and change it again. If the music doesn't move, then it's dead.

When I first started playing music in 1955, there was just a small body of people that knew it. It was a very esoteric type of thing.

If we look at music history closely, it is not difficult to isolate certain elements of great potency which were to nourish the art of music for decades, if not centuries.

Music is always gonna change; it's just a matter of keeping up with the times.

I always want to keep moving musically and trying new things.

Music is constantly developing and changing.

If you go out and just play the old stuff and never write new stuff, you're not really a complete musician, you're a performer.

The whole thing about 'progressive R&B' blows my mind. Black music has always been progressive.

Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.

I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.

I'm trying to change the root of funk, trying to make it more progressive, more melodic and more lyrically structured.

You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.

Me and Jerry left because we felt we weren't getting anywhere playing our old songs in tiny clubs. The group was getting stale and staying behind the times.

When I was growing up, the blues did seem too simple to me. I was just a muso.

The songwriting has never really stepped forward from the '50's.

The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.