Jose James Quotes

You have to react to what's around you in the moment, whatever the music is. Just think of it as some place you have to enter and you need to find the key.

I may play the same songs night to night, but I never play them the same way.

I was the same kind of father as I was a harpist - I played by ear.

I do read music, but I prefer playing from the heart.

Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law.

The apparatus has to serve our improbability and improvisation. Being good and playing the songs is not enough.

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.

No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing.

As a singer, I float around. I'm kind of scatty, bouncing around a lot. I try to adapt to what's going on around me in the song and the arrangement.

I can't read sheet music, I have to just listen to it, and then just go for it.

I'm versatile, so however the beat makes me go on it, that's just what it do.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.

Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

I don't think I'm singing. I feel like I'm playing a horn...What comes out is what I feel.

I still have a very nonintellectual, nonjudgmental relationship with melody and the music as I hear it all in my head.

There's a difference between ad-libbing and improvising. And there's a difference between not knowing what to do and just saying something. Or making choices as an actor. As a writer also, as a person who's making a film, as a cameraman, everything is a choice. And it seems to me I don't really have to direct anyone or write down that somebody's getting drunk; all I have to do is say that there's a bottle there and put a bottle there and then they're going to get drunk.

The problem with improvisation is, of course, that everyone just slips into their comfort zone and does sort of the easy thing to do, the most obvious thing to do with your instrument.

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.

Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

When we got to the part where we had to improvise an argument in a poetic language, I got cold feet. "I can't do this," I said. "I don't know what to say." "Say anything," he said. "You can't make a mistake when you improvise." "What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?" "You can't," he said. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another." In this simple exchange, Sam taught me the secret of improvisation, one that I have accessed my whole life.

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.

I've never approached classical music in a formal way, ever. I couldn't read very well. I'd have to play every piece and internalize it, almost as if I had written it myself.

Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.

Sound is what drives my solos, not verbal concepts, I never think 'I'm going to use a Lydian Dominant scale and then go up a half-step', even though that might be exactly what I end up doing.