Ruggiero Ricci Quotes

You can read all the textbooks and listen to all the records, but you have to play with musicians that are better than you.

Whenever I go jamming, people are looking to cut me. The young ones learn my stuff and come play it at me, and I have to learn other stuff. I feel a lot of pressure. But it's cool. It's a good pressure.

The more I come to understand music, the more I feel like a numbskull because there is always more to learn. The more I do it, the more I'm humbled. I'm just always trying to get better at it. I pick up a few tricks along the way.

I guess actually playing on the records and touring is a great forced practice regimen for me. And you learn a lot playing with people.

I was very lucky that more experienced musicians allowed me to caterwaul until I figured out what it was really about.

When I work with different musicians, I draw a lot of things from them, and that has really expanded my musical thinking.

Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?

I sort of enjoy being able to hear what other composers are doing and how they might score something differently than me. I enjoy that part.

Over the years, I played with a couple of spectacular guitar players, and playing with them has made me play better than I knew how to play. I hope the same thing is true with acting.

You know as I started as a shy young conductor, I always wanted to cooperate. To build up the musicians. To help them to be better than without a conductor. And sometimes young talented musicians have to be encouraged.

Being in a different band always brings great musical experiences to be able to draw on.

One of the things that's influenced me musically was my experience at Brown University. I was surrounded by musicians that I really admired, and felt challenged to come up with music, lyrics, and recordings that stood up to the expectations of those musicians and myself.

I would join a band, learn from that band and be committed and passionate and bring my thing to the band. Then, when I felt like we were going to repeat ourselves, and I needed to learn more, I would go somewhere else.

The key to longevity is to learn every aspect of music that you can.

In so many ways, it feels the same now when I play as the very first time I picked up the instrument. There's always this sound out there that's just a little bit beyond my reach and I'm trying to get there and that just sort of keeps me going.

So, I just kind of played the way I played and then eventually we kind of figured out what worked best for the band. So, I definitely changed my stuff up and I think we're playing really tight now.

I'm not a huge practicer, which is probably not a good thing because my band definitely needs to practice.

I met Quincy Jones in Seattle. We were kids together... liked each other when we met and have been close ever since. He wasn't writing when we met - in fact, I more or less started him off to write; voicing, harmony, and stuff like that.

I think I've become a much better singer and a much better player. Years and years of playing a couple of hours every day will do that.

My dream collaboration is with Lauryn Hill. Is that ever gonna' happen? Who knows! But there's still a lot I feel like musically I could do.

I get to play with all these different players who don't necessarily approach music always the same way that I might. So I learn a lot.

A lot of the way I sing is playing off other musicians. It's what I love to do the most.

One of the things that the Grateful Dead did, way back when, was we spent a lot of time just turning each other on to music. If somebody was listening to something that really caught their ear, they'd make sure that everybody else in the band heard it, and that came home for us in innumerable ways.

I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.

I used to be opposed to collaboration, and that's probably why the music in the past wasn't as good. Writing with other people, especially the great writers that I've had the privilege to write with, it activates something in your mind that you wouldn't use alone.