I wanted to play drums and if I didn't play drums, I wouldn't make music and drums are the foundation for what I do.
I was always drawn to gospel music and the roots of African-American music. It's the foundation of rock and roll.
Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building.
I think music should be the basis of an education, not just something you do once a week.
The piano is a universal instrument. If you start there, learn your theory and how to read, you can go on to any other instrument.
The blues is the foundation for a lot of things. Things have branched off. It's cool how music grows, but the foundation is always there. It's not going anywhere. The blues is always going to be relevant.
Ask anyone. If it hadn't been for Elvis, I don't know where popular music would be. He was the one that started it all off, and he was definitely the start of it for me.
The bass player's function, along with the drums, is to be the engine that drives the car... everything else is merely colours.
Oh yeah, we all write. That's what's great about when you have basics in piano.
Jazz isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going to survive unless it's got some jazz influence.
The piano is where everything starts and ends. Everything is based off of it. If you understand that, you wind up understanding a lot more in all other instruments. For me, it had always been something important to try and learn.
I always felt that I was one of the women who helped lay the foundation for rock and roll. But I'd always been overlooked by the Hall of Fame.
A song has to be hummable and memorable at it simplest form, and that's what bass does for me. I feel like the glue to everything.
The blues has been the foundation of all other American music since the beginning.
The basis of everything that I plugged into when I was younger was blues, and it always stayed with me.
I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.
Being classically trained gave me the real foundation for music. It's so important in my life. Why was I influenced by all these styles of music? Because it gave me a sense of freedom. It made me feel like I could put my hand in a colored bag and pull out a different colored candy and have fun with it.
All along, I did what I was comfortable doing, which was to play the music I enjoyed and try to stretch the parameters a bit. Country and bluegrass and folk were my foundation.
For guitar players especially, blues is the foundation of rock and roll. You take country music and rock and roll and jazz and you mix it together, and that's my basic makeup.
The first notes I still play when I start a sound check are classical. Those are my roots.
What I think is the most important thing to learn about any instrument is the basics of music. Learn your ABCs before you write a Hemingway novel.
I think having musical training as a child was really, really important. I studied piano as a child. Piano is a great instrument to understand musical theory on. I think I have that in my brain somewhere.
The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.
To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand.
The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.
