Al Jarreau Quotes

Either your understanding of the meaning of music is there from the beginning or it is not.

Everyone hears a song a different way and hears timing a different way.

When you start reading a piece together, you get a sense of someone's basic philosophy of music without saying a word. You realize the other person's approach, how they express themselves, the kind of restraint they show, all those things.

How we absorb music is unique. I know what I do. When I'm listening to music, I tend to find myself in a song. That's what really makes you connect is if you feel what that song is saying.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

There were two things I discovered when I toured with Snoop. One was that the band was all jazz musicians. The second was to instil in me a respect for other styles of music. From then on, whenever I played a new kind of music, I came with the same kind of open mind. What are they trying to do? What are they hearing? How do they see music?

I think listening to real classic soul material made me learn how to feel music that's sung.

Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

The level on which Japan seems to have picked up on my music seems to be on a more abstract level.

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.

In other words, I think that if an audience listens to something as an experience of how in tune it is or something of that kind, that the whole point is somehow being missed, and the music has failed.

People have taught me not to look for intelligence in rockmusic.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

Music is subjective to everyone's unique experience.

I can't play any instrument for the life of me, but I know what I want to hear.

I abhor the words 'classical music.' Few things satisfy me more than a really good cover version.

I was born understanding the language of music.

I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand.

My perception is that there is no distinction in music as many people perceive. The difference lies in the way you hear the music.

My scratching I don't really think communicates to intelligent life forms. Anyone with more than one brain cell would think Kid Koala music is completely retarded.

Every violinist has a different style, so it's important to be able to recognise their styles. You don't have to like everyone's style but you have to know these styles.

What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.

The course hitherto pursued in musical aesthetics has nearly always been hampered by the false assumption that the object was not so much to inquire into what is beautiful in music as to describe the feelings which music awakens.