Kurt Elling Quotes

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

A lot of people may not know how competitive it is to play classical music, because when you think about it, the music that you're playing is music that's been here for years. And all you're trying to do is improve upon it when you play.

If our main goal is to connect emotionally, we should want to have as many tools as we possibly can to achieve that goal. The more abilities that we have, the more choices we can make musically.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.

I can't even read music. All I know is whether I think it sounds good and if I like what I'm doing.

The right notes mean more than 1,000 mph arpeggios.

Piano playing consists of common sense, heart and technical resources. All three should be equally developed. Without common sense you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine. The profession does have its hazards.

Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.

Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do.

I love the power of the musician who composes and performs. I envy their ability to put a nugget of truth in three minutes of sweat and emotional outpouring, colored entirely from their thoughts.

I can't read music. That's not where I come from musically. I come strictly from feeling, and that feeling comes from rock & roll.

Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs and bring about my interpretation of them.

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

No one has any respect for someone who can play a million notes per minute but can't put together a decent tune that someone can sing to or feel some sort of emotion from.

A good interpreter can take a piece of bad music and make it sound pretty decent, while a bad interpreter can take good music and make it sound cheap. I can tell that some people have a bad taste, and unlike on the piano, they smear around a lot, that is bad taste.

Music has nothing to do with your technical ability.

You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

When a pianist sits down and does a virtuoso performance he is in a technical sense transmitting more information to a machine than any other human activity involving machinery allows.