Pierre Boulez Quotes

You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

There's a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they've been wearing.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.

Sometimes I think that I want to do something strictly basic, really simple. Just with a few chords. But I won't have anything more than two or three sentences in my head. That kind of evaporates once I start playing and then it goes off in whatever direction.

If I pick up a guitar, I don't practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven't done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It's not like the music I'm doing is just a single thread.

In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I'd stick it in again.

It's an incredible thing when you are creating something in a moment with the other people on stage and with an audience, and you are all experiencing it together as it exists in that one night. It's a magical feeling.

I didn't have to apply my mind to the aspects of scales and playing, and instead, I focused on creativity. I wrote music, but I didn't 'practice' it. So yeah, you can always get better and improve your technique, but hopefully, that comes through being a musician and composing and being a creative individual.

In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.

There is indeed a level of improvisation where we can distort and shuffle the music patterns, samples, and loops in each phase of the show within fixed cue points, but at the same time there is a constant result that we are trying to achieve each night while performing and operating our system - quite similar in spirit to a broadway show for example: If you go see a musical two nights in a row, the performances are different yet similar.

We're all about trying to play better every night, not just singing hit songs ... we ad lib, and every night there's jamming .. it's almost like the Grateful Dead meets Buck Owens some nights, because we'll go off on little adventures and sometimes we do crash the bus!.

I hate when there's a band that you've loved and you go and see them and it's like only the really new experimental stuff from the current album.

I think we are really in touch with what's going on around us in the world of music, trying to push the bar forward and try new and exciting things that our fans can react to.

At Second City and improvising at iO, you're creating a character in an instant. All of a sudden, you're creating this history and this past for your character, and you're discovering it while you're doing it, and that's part of the fun of it.

My records are one thing. My live performances are something totally different because they're very improvised performances.

Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

I play by ear - I'm self-taught. And so everything I do is through that technique.

The more you play, you get a better rhythm and play better.

Songs seem to always spring from improvisation.

I don't really write. I'm an on-the-spot type of person. This beat, let's listen to it; let's vibe. And then I'll do a melody, and then we'll go back and do it.

The musicians in the band, and myself as a performer, love the risks of the unpredictable and the feeling of jumping off cliffs musically.

Very early on, I started improvising. I was more interested in the music that came out of me than any music I heard.

When improvisation is properly applied, it is compositional thinking, sped way up.

I like to tinkle at my piano when I'm working out a new song - I just put my fingers down and see what comes out.