Artie Shaw Quotes

My occupation is syncopation. But, every time, my syncopation is different, because I can never play the same fill twice. I just can't, never have been able to.

My wife, Gayle, is a wonderful musician and singer. We share music, so it's a deep bond.

I was in punk rock bands, heavy metal bands, world music bands, jazz groups, any type of music that would take me. I just love music.

The theory is that you don't play a song the same way twice because it's jazz. That's where I'm coming from.

I like to use my voice as an instrument and just play along with the music. That's really how I tend to my voice. The content usually comes after or during that process of just trying to be an instrument.

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I've heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn't swinging.

Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.

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.

I like Stan [Getz], because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies - other people can't get nothing out of a song, but he can, which takes a lot of imagination.

Listening to Benny [Goodman] talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel.

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time.

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

Jazz musicians are so comfortable. The reason they can't do what we do is because they're so comfortable doin' what they do.

I don't know that many chords. I'd be loaded if I knew that many. But that's not my aim. My aim is to move from one vein to the other without any trouble. The biggest thing to me is keeping a feeling, regardless what you play. So many cats lose their feeling at various times, not through the whole tune, but at various times, and it causes them to have to build up and drop down, and you can feel it.

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

I love being a drummer but I love being a musician in general and I love the Foo fighters.

I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.

I ... started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that's just the way it came out.

I just think swing is a matter of some good things put together that you can really pat your foot by. I can't define it beyond that.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody.

The finest singing, given a good voice to begin with, comes from the constant play of a fine mind upon the inner meaning of the music.

Playing live is about going for it .. it's about bringing it ... you should see a bunch of people trying out stuff, actually performing, instead of learning the record and recreating it note for note. I can't play the show the same way every night .. I really need to be in a creative environment, every night or I'll go nuts ... my manager accuses me of singing just long enough to get me to my next guitar solo - which is true.

I'll tell you a little secret about the Blues: it's not enough to know which notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played.