Rhythmic Complexity Quotes

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

I grew up on Dilla, Timbaland, Pharrell, all these drums that are super pocketed, so all those influences come out on a song like 'Ungrateful Eyes,' with all the crazy drum swing.

Everyone to me has to pick a subject to talk about in music if you're going to be a writer.

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

The way I was singing the songs was jazz

Jazz is something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

We've done very different Yes albums - 11 bars, 13. I think we had something that had 17/4 in it. It's just like anything - the more you do it, the more you have to do it.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

It's just music. It's trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes. The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it. It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible.

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.

jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.

I like creating these rhythmic patterns. These interlocking rhythmic things are really fun.

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.

Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but they weren't sweet.

When I hear the words jazz pianist, that just means I have the skills to do most things. Because to be a jazz pianist, even to be a bad jazz pianist, you have to be pretty good.

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

But since the middle of the century in particular, the music has become very irregular in rhythm.

Music is mathematics, the mathematics of listening, mathematics for the ears.

Interesting phenomena occur when two or more rhythmic patterns are combined, and these phenomena illustrate very aptly the enrichment of information that occurs when one description is combined with another.

The rhythm, the sounds, the tonality, the chord sequences, the individual effect of each instrument and each section of the band - I'm talking about a whole continent in my music.

Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.

The American drummer is a one-man percussion orchestra.

Jazz was the beginning of rhythm music, which developed into rock and roll. But what the jazz musicians lost because they were so far from their homeland was the intricate rhythms of African music.