Woody Guthrie Quotes

The musicians recommend that I sing a sing the way it is written the first time and then start to look for other notes that aren't in the melody.

Triple tonguing? It was sort of invented. It wasn't in the script. It was something that I came up with.

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.

A person like Carole King could make up something, change it, and actually improve it.

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.

If you are playing repertoire material, you're stuck. There's not huge amounts you can do.

As a singer, I float around. I'm kind of scatty, bouncing around a lot. I try to adapt to what's going on around me in the song and the arrangement.

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

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

In Mali, you hear music everywhere. What is fantastic in Mali is the music tradition is handed down from father to son orally. It is not written. You learn from your father and add something, because you are living now and telling a story to others. This results in many different interpretations of the same song.

If you hit a wrong note, it's the next note that you play that determines if it's good or bad.

I'm like a movie director, so wherever I feel that I need to go over this type of beat, that's what I'm going to do, that's where I'm going to go.

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

... The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz....you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.

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

You have to be ready, and also you have to discard notions that are fondly held by a lot of musicians, about sequences and notes and about scales and musical systems as a whole. If you think of music as a language, the space part is where you throw out all the syntax.

A working artist is a playing artist.

Don't worry about how you 'should' draw it. Just draw it the way you see it.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

... maybe that's all anyone who writes or paints or sculpts is doing anyway -- excusing themselves for refusing to live like other people or be like them.

You know that in order to copyright material somebody has to write it down for you. Any piece of recorded material has to be scored in order for it to be copyrighted. I've seen the scores of my things and they don't resemble the music in any way. If you give them to somebody who has never heard the music and say, "What does this sound like to you?" they'll play you something that has no relationship with the music it derives from. Notation simply isn't adequate.

I can write the stuff and play it myself and have something in my head, but the best feeling is when somebody else plays it and they're hearing something other than what I'm hearing.

Every ‘mistake’ is an opportunity in jazz.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.