Elif Batuman Quotes

What's really good is African drum music.

What I'm trying to do, in my own small way, is trying to bring African and Afro-Cuban rhythms into rock.

I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.

For me to have the opportunity to learn the darbuka and the tabla in Dubai, it created my own thoughts for music.

It's great to see Latino music coming to the mainstream, but at the same time, there are also a lot more styles to explore: African music, Indian music, Chinese music.

Everybody does music from his culture and his experiences with his culture. There are not so many people who are interested by the music coming from different countries and different cultures and trying to make music from that, from all these experiences.

Egyptian drumming happens to be a favorite of mine. It's a really simple instrument, but it's really difficult to play. You can take it anywhere with you - you can play it in your room, in an airport. It's very quiet, so you explore the quiet side.

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don't know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

Stuff like Buena Vista Social Club and Fela Kuti were quite a main thing to my childhood. As soon as I reached an age where I realized that Fela was singing in English, when I got past his accent, I loved the rawness of it, and the funk and the rhythm and the melody.

I think we're about ready for a new feeling to enter music. I think that will come from the Arabic world.

I've always tried to listen to a lot of different music from around the world.

Traveling all around the world, music sounds different.

The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scotts as a joke, but the Scotts haven't seen the joke yet.

White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.

There's a similarity between European and North African folk musics.

I've played American, Italian, Greek, French. I've been really lucky that way.

When I was 11, I went to Puerto Rico for a month to stay with my grandmother. To see the way people lived there and experience my own culture was wonderful.

We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn't hear it.

For me, even just being English was a whole sort of experience in as much as I'm Australian.

During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life.

This American Jewish music is a new experience for us at least consciously.

I have always loved music. My mom used to sing with my sister and I when I was younger, and I was in choirs and loved to perform, but when I was in college, I went on a study abroad to Trinidad, and while I was there, I sang backup at my first concert.

I think that's what makes many Swedes jealous of immigrant groups. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that brings you together. And what do we have? We have Midsummer's Eve and such silly things.

The Armenian contribution to Turkish culture was immense: they set up the first modem Turkish theatre, they published books in Turkish, they devised Turkish translations for new Western terms and concepts, they were prominent in Turkish music, both as composers and performers.

Generations of tradition and hard work are required to form a nation of traders.