My aunt played the piano and I used to sit and listen to it.
I started formal piano training when I was 4. From there I had little violas, and I had dancing lessons of every sort and description, and painting lessons. I had German. And shorthand.
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.
All my momma's people were very musical. My grandpa, who was the Pentecostal minister, he was a great musician. He played the fiddle, he played the piano.
When I was first starting out, you'd have to bang an old upright piano and stick a mike in it and it would always feed back and you could never turn it up loud enough to be heard and I would beat my hands black and blue and bloody.
If you hear Thelonious Monk play a run that goes from the top of the piano, OK, he has opened up the Grand Canyon with that. He's the river that's carved this entire space that we call the Grand Canyon. He does that with one run. He lets you know, like, what the possibility of the sound of the piano can do.
There is no better feeling in the universe, other than being married and having a family, than standing on stage behind a piano and having 5,000 people waving at you. You cannot bottle that.
I love doing music, and I plan to do it until I die or as long as I can walk to the piano.
When I hear the piano played in a compositional way, like in a songwriter's way in a compositional way, there's a certain arc to that that I love.
With the piano I'm completely in control of the gestural situation-not that I'm going to play the piece myself, but I know what's difficult, what's impossible.
I play drums, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, french horn, piano.
I play the piano and write music.
I draw and play the piano badly. But when I'm doing those things, I'm concentrating so hard there's no room for worry. I find that onstage, too.
The piano is a universal instrument. If you start there, learn your theory and how to read, you can go on to any other instrument.
I was taking piano lessons with a very good piano instructor in Toronto, and I'm afraid due to my schedule and discipline, it kind of fell apart. One thing lead to another and I was unable to practice as much as I wanted to.
I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.
It's like that Simpsons joke - they're filming a cow in a movie and they go, 'OK, we'll tape a bunch of cats together to make a cow', and it's like, 'Why don't you just use a cow?'. For some reason that is novel - like, 'Oh, my guitar sounds like a piano and now if I can just get my piano to sound like my guitar'.
The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.
I was two and a half when I first climbed up and sat at a piano.
My dad keeps referring to me playing the piano when he's trying to teach me something in archery.
The first time I met Ray, I was going to school around the corner from his house. One day, he was playing the piano. I eased up on the porch to listen to him.
Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.
I started playing in the band and learned to play piano by ear.
I really wanted to find a piano for the farm house. There were so many free pianos on Craigslist, I thought, 'Let's get as many free pianos as we can and stick them all in the barn.' I got eight in a short period of time, only six of which were tunable, but it's still quite funny.
The movie business is very difficult but the music business is just impossible. So I'll play in bands and record and play songs with other people, but for me it's a form of expression that all I need is me. I don't need cameras or agents, I can just have a piano and sing and feel totally verified.
I have always studied my parts with the orchestral score and not with the piano reduction.
My music is based on melody and when I play the piano, it's as if I'm singing with them. When you try to transform that into a vocal, there was very little adjustment.
But when I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.
I'm not a great piano player.
If I'm going to Hell, I'm going there playing the piano.
I might have a guitar or a piano on set to play something for the actors.
I love to sing and play the piano. As a child, I've always loved to sing my heart out, and even my teachers encouraged me to take up singing.
I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it; so was my brother.
When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.
We're gonna release a studio album probably a year from now and we've got these recordings that we did with Coco Taylor and Johnny Johnson, who was Chuck Berry's piano player.
I consider myself very fortunate. I mean, I think there's that old saying, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' and I just have such a passion for jazz music and playing the piano that I just find a way to make it work, so to speak. Fortunately, I have so far.
