Margaret Whiting Quotes

Any talk of 'craft' makes me laugh. My music looks outward; it does not gaze upon itself in admiration. Artisanal is for cheesemakers. I don't know anything about music theory. Every time I approach my guitar, it's like the first time. There's no craft in that.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Until you learn to play what you want to hear, you're barking up the wrong tree.

If I play anything that sounds like a solo, it's gonna sound like a lyric.

I didn't want to take the guitar solos down note-for-note, but more or less use them as a map, and keep all the hooks from the guitar playing, and let myself come through.

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.

The first time I learned how to play, my guitar was out of tune. I didn't know it; I just started writing songs.

What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.

I don't read music. I don't write it. So I wander around on the guitar until something starts to present itself.

I like to be sort of grounded with Fish. But, at the same time, I think probably what's unique about us is the way other dynamics happen, where I'll play off Trey for awhile. When we start playing a jam, I don't usually know what's going to happen, I don't have a plan.

I think the best riffs and the best songs come when you're jamming and having a good time.

The best way for me to teach myself an instrument is to just jam on it, and sound awful sometimes, and sound great other times.

Most of the musicians I play with - aside from the form and structure of the music - the interpretation is up to them.

My records are one thing. My live performances are something totally different because they're very improvised performances.

I discovered that I didn't want to be strict like a German composer.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

The words are the important thing. Don't worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you've got a new tune.

You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.

We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus!.

I play music - I write my own music, but I play music, just background music really, and just let it happen.

Now, when we first started, I would be playing something good and then feel like I wasn't doing the right thing and launch into some idiotic cliche. Luckily for me, Bobby was patient.

In the past, I have not been able to hear myself. I play with feeling so I need to hear what is coming out of the amplifier to inspire me; I don't just play mechanically.

My solos are more tastefully conceived now. But I still get going in places. It's just that I build up to it now. I don't race off on a solo. I take my time.

So the actual riffing came out of us just sitting there and doing it the way I think some people think we really did it, which is all spontaneously, and it really was.