Musical Apprenticeship Quotes

I have been given something really, really special and really unique, and it is not just in and of itself having learned from my father, who is the greatest exponent of this musical style. But it is an oral tradition that is only generally passed on in that manner, and so without the people who continue to... learn it and perform it, it dies.

I know when I started I would have been happy to sound like the Beatles or Joe Tex or whoever. You want to sound like most bands, you want to sound like their records and that's how you learn your chops.

I started playing guitar when I was 12 and probably from that age knew that I wanted to make music and make my own music. Playing with other bands like the Polyphonic Spree and Sufjan Stevens was more like an apprenticeship for me than anything.

I think the reason being Ravi Shankar's daughter is not such a pressure to me is that I don't look at myself in that way. Of course, he's the best-known Indian musician there is so, people naturally look to me as the next one, but the truth is there are many other musicians out there as well as other students of my father's.

Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.

I thought the best thing you were supposed to do was find somebody and try to sound like them.

My father, Aparesh Lahiri, was a musician too, and at a very young age, I was geared up for a career in music.

Clapton was just picking up ideas. He picked up some of mine like I picked up some from the people before me.

Whatever is original in my writing comes from my musical apprenticeship. I look for rhythm in words. I imagine words as if they were musical chords. Often I'll write something, read it, and find it musically unsatisfactory. There is a musical imperative in my choice of words.

My oldest boy, when I do skip, he's gonna take over my slot. He was sitting on the stair in diapers wearing my mask with sticks while we were downstairs trying to learn how to be a band.

I didn't study anything really. I didn't learn out of the books because I couldn't read music very well, so it is what they say it is - you learn from other people. And my cohorts and I would sneak around the coffee shops and hear stuff we wanted to learn, and then you ask whoever was playing it to teach you.

The rest of the band were basically friends, So it was me following them around and begging them to let me be in their band for two or three years. And they finally let me in on the harmonica, actually, and then the keyboards, and finally the guitar.

I don't think I ever modeled myself after a singer. I've more or less copied the styles of horn-tooters right from the start.

Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.