Ali Akbar Khan Quotes

It's a wonderful thing to be able to see your music going from generation to generation.

I played with Eddie Taylor's son, Tim Taylor and Carey Bells son Lurie Bell.

I'm in hotel rooms night after night, playing a lot of the same venues as my dad and carrying the guitar that used to be his. We're the same person. I don't know if he realises how much of a legacy he has left to his children.

I don't just come from a musical family, but from a musical community.

We are so indebted to our ancestors, musically speaking, that they have left us 400 years of music.

I love traditional music. But in any culture around the world, there is the historic and cultural music and everything that's been passed down and passed down, and hopefully you take that, and then you take it, you know, the next distance, and then somebody else takes it the next distance.

Here in New Orleans, what a lot of the musical families do - and this is a romantic concept on my part - is they teach their kids to tap dance first. Then after tap dance, you learn piano, and after piano, you get to pick between all the instruments that are out there.

I come from a place where there's a lot of musical families.

Both of my parents were musicians.

I'm becoming hip to my children because bands of their generation name us as influences, so you can definitely hear it, the same way as we were influenced by other people.

There is a mysterious way in which orchestras keep a sense of their history and what they've done. I still listen to the L.A. Philharmonic and feel that Giulini was there.

Ziggy Marley is the third generation of Marleys I know. I knew his grandmother and his dad - I did a children's album with his grandmother. They're like family.

What you have to understand is that blues... it's in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you're playing it like it's an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.

There's a thing about film composing and conducting in my family.

My father's music is all I remember from my childhood.

The music in my family has always been there; it's been quite an obvious trait that seems to have trickled down the bloodline.

I come from a family of musicians.

Imagine if you grew up in a place where your lineage was there for a hundred years, and part of the culture was to play music 50 percent of the time. You'd probably have a lot of musicians in your family too.

Everyone in my family has been in music - my cousins, my grandmother, my grandfather - so it's quite a big family tree.

My mom was a singer, and my dad had been playing in bands with my mom's brother. My dad married my mom, and so I was sorta surrounded by music from the get-go. Born right into it.

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.

I do feel I'm responsible to carrying on the music. That's what I was charged with as a kid. When I was a little girl, I was told, 'When we are gone' - when you're a kid, you never think they'll ever be gone - 'you have to keep the music alive, the Carter Family songs, and add your own songs.'

I was surrounded by music in my family, surrounded by people who sang songs - every single person I knew as a child growing up had one, two, three songs they knew from start to finish.

Across generations, the torch-bearers of Carnatic music have mastered the art form of connection.

You need to put yourself in the way of the music that stood the test of time. You're doing yourself an incredible disservice not be interested in the width and breadth of it.