Herbie Mann Quotes

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

I love all Yes music and love to play it live, but I'm most interested in making new music with Yes.

I listen to all types of music so I'm influenced by everything.

From my time in 'King Crimson,' I'd describe a Progressive band as one that keeps trying to break musical barriers, and keeps trying to do new music.

They believed you can't mix rock, country, and rap, and that crossover is dead. I always knew it would work. And it will always work as long as you're really into it and like what you're doing.

A good story gives you more of a license to be forward and progressive with the music.

I think no matter what kind of music you play, there will be moments when you feel like it's all been done before.

I can make any type of music, so I wouldn't want to describe myself as having one type of sound. I think music is about keeping it diverse.

The drive to create music that is pure is my highest priority. Sometimes I'll get extremely technical, and other times I'll just kind of go with the gods of music.

I listened to the rock music of that time, but as you know and can easily hear: my music of that era had nothing to do with the common music of this era. I was experimenting, I was searching for something new.

It's never too late to do anything new when it comes to music.

I'm always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

That's why so much of the music today sounds so much alike, because there's no in-between. So it's kind of nice to still turn some buttons every now and then.

Creating any type of art is all about mood. I've been making extreme music in one fashion or another for decades. And truthfully, Down has a big enough fan base to where I could remain content to do only that, but music is a vast territory and I am an explorer. And I'm a lover of all things considered extreme in music.

Music should always be an adventure.

I'm very much a traditionalist, but I think it's important to know about tradition so that you can evolve the music you are deciding to make.

I'm a self-confessed geek, and my whole concept of music at first was entirely electronic. In many ways, it turned out to be an advantage. I was so green, so utterly naive about the nature of classical music, that I did things that made me look totally, deliberately unorthodox.

I think it's really important to show new styles of song and music. I think that's what people want to see and hear from me.

In music, I wanted to make sure I was innovating.

We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus!.

A lot of artists have a super-specific musical hero they definitely try to hone in on. I'm basically inspired by everyone. I don't have one particular artist who I'm super-obsessed with.

I can't do too much musical movement with a lot of MC's, because they don't know how to follow me. But with Souls of Mischief, I could go anywhere because they are musicians - they rap as musicians, and they play instruments and produce, so they get that.

I can run the gamut with beats that no one else would think of. I'm not a trained musician, so I focus on what feels right before I dispatch to writing.

Motley never once sat down and said, 'Well, the music scene's changing. We need to make this record a little darker or heavier musically or lyrically.' It was just four guys sitting in a room like a bunch of 16-year-olds in a garage and jamming on riffs.

I would sing around the house, and I would always play on things just because instruments were always there, but I didn't show any genius as a child. I wasn't a prodigy or anything like that.