A Quote by Andre Previn
It's been thrown up to me most of my life: Why don't I just concentrate on conducting or composing or my own playing or on jazz?
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I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now.
Conducting is a natural way to participate in one's own music. Almost every 19th-century composer Mendelssohn, Mahler was conducting or playing his own music. Mozart did both.
I love jazz. So to me, there are two main types of jazz. There's dancing jazz, and then there's listening jazz. Listening jazz is like Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane, where it's a listening experience. So that's what I like; I like to make stuff that you listen to. It's not really meant to get you up; it's meant to get your mind focused. That's why you sit and listen to jazz. You dance to big band or whatever, but for the most part, you sit and listen to jazz. I think it comes from that aesthetic, trying to take that jazz listening experience and put it on hip-hop.
To most people, jazz-fusion means this dreadful synthetic jazz-rock thing, this jazz-Muzak, which I detest. They also think of jazz as a specific form of music, while to me it's just the opposite.
Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate upon it in order to get the most of it.
You must absorb most of it. The harmonies within the music can relax, soothe, relax, and uplift the
mind when you concentrate upon and absorb it. Jazz music stimulates the minds and uplifts the souls
of those who play it was well as of those who listen to immerse themselves in it. As the mind is
stimulated and the soul uplifted, this is eventually reflected in the body.
The most immediately gratifying thing about my work is conducting a large orchestra. But the long range payoff is composing because you've written something and it's there forever.
Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.
Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.
Lars Ulrich is not a jazz drummer, but he grew up listening to jazz. Why? Because his father, Torben - an incredible tennis player - loved jazz. Jazz musicians used to stay at their house.
I opened up my mind as far as playing music. I was at a Cody Chesnutt concert a few years ago, and a friend introduced me to him. We just started talking about music, and he asked me what I did. I said, "I have these songs and I'm kind of nervous to put them out, because I've just kind of been playing blues stuff, and playing other people's songs." He said, "You should just put them out there, man. Why not? It's just gonna bother you if you don't. The easiest thing to do is to just let it go." So I just took that with me.
I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.
I love New Orleans. I love jazz. I grew up practicing jazz piano, and that's just been such a cool genre to me. There's a lot of talent there.
I had not been in the jazz environment, having been brought up in the church. But once I got to New York, and I was signed to perform at The Village Gate and the Vanguard and clubs like that, and these - the Vanguard was one of the most elite, if not the most elite, jazz club out there.
I was never really certain why he scared the bejesus out of me. Nothing scared me growing up. I’ve been playing with dead people since the day I was born, so it’s good thing, yet the Big Bad scared me. Which brings me to the reason I called.” “Which was to give me nightmares for the rest of my life?” “Oh, no, that’s just a plus. Why was I so scared of him?” “Hon, for one thing he was this powerful, massive, black smokelike being.” “So, you’re saying I’m a racist?
There's a thing about film composing and conducting in my family.
I got into playing the jazz. I played jazz for a good while. I did the popular stuff first. You got the "Twelfth Street Rag" and those kinds of things. Then I got to hanging around with a bunch of guys starting to playing jazz. We'd go from one place to the other and take our instruments, just perform for free.
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