Louis Armstrong Quotes

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - that is confrontational. That's just a part of the language of jazz - at a certain point.

At Bloomington, Indiana, I was invited to listen to music written in quarter tones for four harps and voices. I had to go out to be sick.

Even back when I played 'straight-ahead,' I mixed it up. I played some free-form, classical adaptations, solo flute stuff. It was New Age in its own way.

We were really interested in music from all over the world. We realized that what we were doing was very close to contemporary classical music because of the lack of tonality in the guitar- the fact that I play guitar the way I play.

I'm very eclectic in my music tastes - anything from Nina Simone to Beethoven to Talvin Singh.

Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it.

I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill.

Lightning Bolt and Hella are two bands I listen to, and there's a lot of finger tapping going on there.

Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.

Post-minimalism implies music that's genre-less. Minimalism was very important because it came at a time when contemporary music had become so complex, so experimental and detached that people turned away from it. Minimalism broke that trend and brought music back to the people.

When I hear 'fusion,' I think of Tricky-Dick stuff - really hairy melodies played in unison. It's like, 'Why?'

Music doesn't have to sit within the confines of pop structure, you can really make stuff that's more visual.

As a trumpet player, I was playing Xenakis, Lindberg: very challenging, technical, atonal, and I enjoyed it.

If you had to call it "unison", it ain't unison. It ain't the same as somebody else. If you can hear that it's unison, and you have to name it something other than "unison", it ain't unison, you know what I mean? It's two guys playin', but one guy is playin' slightly out of tune, one is playin' slightly off meter.

That's really where my heart is, unfortunately - I'm less interested in songwriting and more into just making noise.

The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'

Avant-garde is the one area of music that has never changed. It doesn't mean anything.

I did Noise Music because I genuinely liked noise... But a lot of people didn't. At my concerts, people smashed beer glasses in my face.

I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.

You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."

When I hear the words jazz pianist, that just means I have the skills to do most things. Because to be a jazz pianist, even to be a bad jazz pianist, you have to be pretty good.

Jazz never ends... it just continues.

I'm talking about noise rock. I don't think that noise rock element belongs in jazz. It's not for me anyway; it just doesn't fit.