When words leave off, music begins.
I use music as a medium to talk to people.
I find in music there's a space and a language I can use to express things in ways I can't describe conversationally.
Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.
Jazz music is a language of the emotions.
The danger of that - and there's a grave danger that I, myself, have to be very aware of - is that you become so involved and intrigued in the language that sometimes you lose track that that is only a means to an aesthetic experience that the listener has to get.
As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.
The Royal Opera House? I once had the immense privilege of appearing there and was awed by the air of refinement of those seemingly ethereal beings who floated about in the highest echelons of musical accomplishment, effortlessly producing virtuoso performances in several different languages.
There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what, for me, is inexpressible by any other means.
Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones.
Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.
I can communicate far better on a guitar than I can through my mouth.
A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.
Music is one whole force. And I think the Proms have always represented very clearly that music is a universal language, one that everyone can speak. I've just followed my goosebumps in every direction and have found a recipe for what my music feels and sounds like.
I love to learn, and I started doing a lot of studying of Spanish-style music and really started getting into it and how it is just a completely different form of guitar playing. It is just like if you started speaking in a different language like Japanese or something. It is something that you have to study and work at a lot.
Sling your guitar to wherever you're going, and you'll be amazed by the connective power of music: It knows no boundaries, cultures or class.
My main language was music, and my teacher was nature.
I don't write, I build a rhyme.
The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.
I keep quiet and let the music do the talking.
If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.
Jazz is the language of the emotions.
What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.
