I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers... They use my tools.
There's no difference in a lot of people's minds between good musicians and popular musicians.
I always dream about other musicians. And they're never interested in hanging out with us. It's like being at school and the bigger boys don't want to play with you!
The Doors were never that good as musicians.
There were bars that began to have acoustic musicians play, it was 1970: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, America, The Eagles, all that kind of stuff was popular. It was very easy for me to just kind of move in and be noticed.
The intensity of being in front of all these incredible musicians and tremendous conductors in these elaborate halls can be overwhelming.
I've heard from writers and musicians and fans that they think I'm underrated.
Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds.
I would look at older blues musicians who just keep going into their seventies. They keep doing it until they drop dead. And I've always felt like that's what I want to do. I've felt that since the day I was able to start playing music for a living. I don't see the point of thinking about retiring because it's not work to begin with.
Musicians don't respect a lot of the stuff that is on TRL and a lot of musicians think that stuff on the radio is not good musically so when musicians say that they like us it obviously feels good.
The pop musicians often leave meaning in the dust and substitute it for cartoons. The deeper artists - the grunge artists in the world and the emoticon people - tend to leave all of the happiness out of life like it just doesn't exist.
The great musicians are those who can reach people, who can make people feel something.
These people are artists. These people are musicians. They're taking it out and trying to express it that way.
I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.
The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed. If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won't succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.
The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation.
I talk to people who are musicians, and they go, Oh this is hell. And I go, Are you kidding me? You never put tar paper on a roof, did ya?
But recently I began to feel that maybe I wouldn't be able to do what I want to do and need to do with American musicians, who are imprisoned behind these bars; music's got these bars and measures you know.
I think that what trips up a lot of great musicians is that they become involved with too many things that aren't where their strengths lie.
You know as I started as a shy young conductor, I always wanted to cooperate. To build up the musicians. To help them to be better than without a conductor. And sometimes young talented musicians have to be encouraged.
Musicians can run this state better than politicians. We won't get a lot done in the mornings, but we'll work late and be honest.
THE GODS was my first professional band and I learned a lot during that time. It was very cool playing with so many great musicians as it helped me to learn.
It's always great playing with other musicians. It's also a great situation where I'm the older guy, I've influenced generations of guitar players.
When I was recording from '70 to '82, I always played piano and laid the tracks down. But I used to talk to the other musicians while the track was playing.
There's Eddie's conviction and his lyrics and his ideals, and he can just rock straight out. His vocals are incredible. And we all are really competent musicians.
Very few of us have our special listening room where we close off the rest of the world and only hear the music. As musicians or as listeners, we're generally interacting with music wherever we are, whether we're on a train or on the street.
One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.
Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
I remember once, we got an interview, and he said, 'Dad, these people are writing about me like I'm an adult. Don't they know I'm a kid?' I have never tried to encourage him to get a music image like other musicians have.
When we started making electronic music I imagined that the reaction we got from the rock musicians must have been similar to the one the beat groups got from people like my dad.
Whitney Houston and Ella Fitzgerald are my musical mothers. I learned everything I know about true R&B, pop and jazz singing from these stunning performers and unparalleled musicians.
What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don't think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact.
Once I took a bus from my home in Maryland to Philadelphia to live on the streets with some musicians for a few weeks, and then my parents sent me to boarding school at Andover to shape me up.
Great music seems to come from a lot of angst, and that angst is from great musicians getting together with intense chemistry. When that chemistry isn't there, people tend not to write great music.
At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did.
So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary.
