It's impossible to play a run with as much feeling as a single note. I've never been so much into runs as making single notes cry.
In our hands, even the straightest lyric sounded shady.
Music is the silence between the notes.
I wanted to develop a guitar style where phrases and lines get there just in the nick of time, like with Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper. Subtleties mean so much, and there is a stunning beauty in them.
I love rhythmic dancing - I'm not derogating it at all. It's just that sometimes you want to whisper, "I adore you." And for that you need strings and woodwinds.
The distance between me and Benny [Goodman], was that I was trying to play a musical thing, and Benny was trying to swing. Benny had great fingers; I'd never deny that. But listen to our two versions of 'Star Dust.' I was playing; he was swinging.
But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.
I get to play around with different ideas and beautiful melodies. I don't have to yell in a rock voice. I think you can get an emotional depth in the types of rooms we're playing that you can't find in larger rooms.
Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!
But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there's a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that's possible with the instrument.
Piano is unique in that way: it can be both percussive and haunting.
David Gilmour can do more with one note than most other guitar players can do with the whole fretboard
If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.
I really wanted to get that dynamic on the record onto people and let them know it wasn't just a simple strumming along the guitar type of thing without ramming it down their throats so I kind of went the opposite way and sang some of the songs more quietly which allowed for the louder parts to sound as though there were more. It was the only way singing those songs made sense to me.
You've got to know much more than the mere technicalities of notes. You've got to know sounds and what goes between the notes.
I'd rather hold one note for an hour and modulate it so that it means something than play 3,000 notes in 15 seconds.
The finest singing, given a good voice to begin with, comes from the constant play of a fine mind upon the inner meaning of the music.
A few years ago, I had an interest in making things that felt more like "pieces." That was when I was making a lot of stuff that you could call beats, and it dawned on me that I could say much more nuanced, precise things if I tried to make them more composed. It sounds a bit corny, but I do love the idea that something can make you forget that you're listening and just transport you to somewhere else in your head.
A lot of those little things that I really like doing are just moments of cool articulation, just little moments of phrasing that probably go over everybody's head.
Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.
What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians... All publication s masquerading under the name of ragtime are not the genuine article... That real ragtime of the higher class is rather difficult to play is a painful truth which most pianists have discovered. Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music... Joplin ragtime is destroyed by careless or imperfect rendering, and very often players lost the effect entirely by playing too fast.
I don't know if I have a problem expressing joy, but the difficulty is in making an album, a piece of music that really does reflect life rather than the one dimension. I have a problem in trying to make a complete trip record.
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes ah, that is where the art resides.
I fingerpick a lot because I can get more of a range of feeling from the guitar than I can when I bash away with a pick.
My policy is not how fast you play, it's not how much you play but it's what you play and where you play it ... play for the commercial side of the music ... the word I still use today is called "simplicity" .. it is so important that you use simplicity in your playing and in your music.
