Musical Expectation Quotes

The first time I heard Johnny play at the Fillmore East, I wasn't really impressed. He had come on the scene with everybody telling me how great he was, and I didn't hear it.

I don't know who was the one that came up with the notion that you have to play the same songs every concert.

There's a very curious and - and almost sadistic lust for blood that overcomes the concert listener, and there's a waiting for it to happen: a waiting for the horn to fluff; a waiting for the strings to become ragged; a waiting for the conductor to forget the subdivide, you know? And it's dreadful!

I'd love to knock an audience cold with one note, but what do you do for the rest of the evening?

We all want to play great music all the time, but if that is not possible, you have to hit as many right notes as you can.

Innovating something that is familiar. That's the general approach, and that's what I want to do with the melody as well. It should ring true - you should like every melody sequence without knowing what's happening next.

I hear a lot of people saying my stuff sounds the same. When you're in my position, people come to you to give them the same sound in a different type of way.

You start to compete with yourself when your catalog gets bigger and bigger... I mean, everybody wants the next 'Bless the Broken Road,' but you don't write those every day, so it's difficult.

I think the reason being Ravi Shankar's daughter is not such a pressure to me is that I don't look at myself in that way. Of course, he's the best-known Indian musician there is so, people naturally look to me as the next one, but the truth is there are many other musicians out there as well as other students of my father's.

I've had experiences where people say, 'I hated jazz before I heard you guys!' I'm like, 'You didn't hate jazz before you heard us; you hated the idea of jazz.'

I was always nervous to play my father's [John Lennon's] songs.

If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.

You hear the beginning of a melody, you should kind of know it's going to lead down this path. It should start feeling like a friend, like familiar.

A lot of people give in to those pressures and let others influence the process on their second albums because they want to achieve the success they had with their first again, but they don't know how to do it.

One of the problems we had was trying to live up to this bubbly image. All the music was supposed to be bubbly. That's what people expected from us. But that was very limiting.

I don't want to be typecast as the 'ambient guy' or someone who only does electronic scores. I think most of the work that comes my way is because people feel they know me musically.

The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.

It is not enough that the artist should be well prepared for the public. The public must be well prepared for what it is going to hear.

The collective conscience of a hundred musicians is no light burden. Think for a moment of what it would mean to a pianist if by some miracle every key of his instrument should suddenly become a living thing.

Some people like very predictable melodies, and others prefer the less likely notes.

I don't like drums dictating the song; like when you hear a fill and then you know the chorus is coming up.

When I got my band in 1983, I knew what I had to do. If I'm going to have a big band, they're going to have to sound equally as good as what I'm used to hearing.

It was a relief to be able to do my own band, because I was very responsible for all this amazing music I didn't want to mess up before.