Sarah Vaughan Quotes

I really believe in melody.

I don't have an extensive background in theory, but the amount of it that I've learned, I've applied, so I have a vocabulary of melodic and rhythmic relationships. And that's all theory is - it's symbols to help you identify those relationships.

If I've made something really serene... well, if everything is like that, it's like having too much icing on your cake. You need something else under it, some kind of grounding. It's like if you're making a film, you can't have only happy moments, or else they become meaningless.

Ever since 'Hail to the King,' we've been more cognizant of our chord progressions, our key changes, drama in songs, a lot of dynamics - we've really added a lot of that in there.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

The concept is basically; that the pieces we know and love are made up of scales, arpeggios, and the like.

In improvising, you've got your scale; you've got the notes that are going to sound good with other notes, the intervals that are going to sound good. But you've also got all the chromatic possibilities, the possibilities of sounding dissident, of being unexpected.

Music is about textures as well as melody.

I have a visual sense for the music. It has to stay true to a certain sense of period. I rely on a sense of colors and mood in my approach to the arrangement.

It's not about retro or modern, it's about this note or that note, which sounds better?

I'm not technical. When I listen to music, I gravitate more toward the sonic aspect of it. The technical stuff of it, I get bored with it. These long solos? OK, already. You know your scales, big deal. I know it, too, but I don't want to do that.

In writing music, the structure of each piece is a very important factor.

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

Well, the first day we went through three songs, very basically.

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world.

I listen to a lot of singers, because I find phrasing to be one of the most essential elements of playing.

I liken movies to playing a piano: Sometimes you're playing the chords and different notes with unresolved cadences and playing all major chords that are all over the place, and you're enjoying yourself with a great, simple melody.

We knew we wanted to put a lot of melody into it - a lot more than what we did on our first album.

Music would lose its charm were not dissonance interspersed at frequent intervals. The closer a composer can come to discord without actually entering it in the score, the more pleasing will be his composition when given life through musical instruments.

If you listen to a lot of the songs that are popular now, there's very little melody in there. People love the beat. But to musicians, it's melody, because we understand how elusive it is and how hard it is to hold.

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

The kind of acting I love is when you watch and you discover what you think perhaps you weren't supposed to see: the chink in the armor.

I studied harmony and composition in a very spontaneous manner.