Damien Chazelle Quotes

The difficulties people have with me are purely musical things, never personality things. But, you know that's just the way it goes. I like to get things right!

The musical training taught me to focus my mind, before playing in an orchestra taught me how to truly concentrate. If you miss your moment in an orchestra, there is no forgiving.

To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal. You require absolute control and professionalism.

I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.

Japanese orchestras are generally playing at quite a high level on the first day of rehearsal, but they don't improve very much from there.

We all want to play great music all the time, but if that is not possible, you have to hit as many right notes as you can.

I was really conscious of that when I went in because I felt that I was pretty solid on the first one, but I didn't have the groove exactly where I wanted it.

I'm not good enough, technically, to be a classic musician. I lack discipline.

Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.

If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake.

The only time I'm miserable is when I can't keep an instrument in tune.

In the Shao Lin temple, they never allow you to touch the skin of a drum until you can tongue what you're going to play.

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.

There's not an orchestra in the world that doesn't have weaknesses. None of us can play everything well. The repertoire is just too big.

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

Session work makes you more strict. You can't hit notes all over the place. You've got to make each one really count.

Toward the later days of Sabbath, instead of going in and knocking out what songs we did in rehearsal, we would polish them to death.

Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.

Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.

I'd actually been making my living as an organist with bands since I was probably 15 or 16 years old, and then as a senior in high school I put together a jazz quintet called The Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet.

If you call someone up on a mistake - if the drummer's put an extra beat in a bar or something - you have a lot more authority if you can show them how to do it right.

I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that's not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter. The conductor would just rip into me, and it lasted for years.

Every time I hear a recording I've made, I hear all kinds of things I could improve or things I should have done. There's always so much more to be done in music. It's so vast.

I never desperately wanted to be a jazz drummer. If anything, I was motivated a lot by fear. Fear of the conductor, fear of the future.

Every riff had to be perfect and heavy, collectively what we wanted it to be. If there was one person in the room who went, 'Heh, I don't think it is there yet, guys,' we'd scrap the whole song. I think that took a little bit of songwriting maturity for us.