My place in London is very small, so a piano would take up a third of the room. I leave home in the morning when I'm there and go to my studio. I close the door, and it's soundproof. There's no phone or TV or computer, and I can work uninterruptedly. That has been a huge advantage over the years.
I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
My family is very musical, I was surrounded by it. And from four years old I was the one that asked my mother could I take piano lessons... It wasn't forced on me. It was something I wanted to do. And ever since, I've never stopped, I've never stopped playing music. I never went through a period where I didn't want to do it.
When I was young, we had nothing. The carpets and upholstery in the palace were full of holes. The floors creaked. Everything was so old. Yes, we had a piano, an upright given to us by the Fine Arts Department. But it was out of tune.
I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.
I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland.
My father was always playing the piano. He played all kinds of music - Gershwin, all kinds of stuff.
Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.
I'm a piano player. I never thought of myself as a singer, at all. I was always trying to sound like somebody else. I don't like my own voice, I like Ray Charles, Robert Plant, I like Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, people that have an edge in their voice.
I started playing piano and guitar when I was in elementary school, and then I was finally like, 'I want to sing.' So I started taking voice lessons and decided I wanted to go to an art school and take music seriously.
I took classical piano lessons from the age of five.
Well, since I'm six years old, I've been playing the violin, the piano, I've been singing. It's always been a dream of mine, but I really never had the courage to actually go and do it professionally.
If you're stuck at piano and you're not a lead guitarist or a lead vocalist, you're kind of at a nine-foot plank then and you should do something about it.
Mostly I play with records. I play with my friend Bill Evans.
Just the instrumentation of the whole 'Beast Mode' made people open up and respect me in a whole other way. With Gucci, I don't use as many instruments. I don't play the piano as much because that's not really the style of music that me and Gucci have built.
One of my earliest memories of writing at a piano was alongside my sister.
I first started playing the violin at 6. And then at 7, it was piano. So from then it was just classical music like every day.
In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can't say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.
I took a year of karate. It was like obligatory... every kid was taking like one year of karate and one year of piano in my town. It was Bruce Lee and Liberace. But I was not a white belt. I graduated. I had a colour belt - but that's all you need to know. It could have been black, it could have been yellow, or it could have been anything in between.
I studied piano for seven years and play for my own enjoyment.
The genome could be thought of as a kind of piano with twenty-five thousand keys. In some cases, a few keys may be out of tune, which can cause the music to sound wrong. In others, if one key goes dead the music turns into a cacophony, or the whole piano self-destructs.
Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.
Piano is very elegant. I also think it's a very truthful instrument.
It is a privilege and an honor to perform on Steinway pianos.
