A Quote by Kevin Kline

I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.
My father's Alfred Newman - born in 1900, child prodigy at the piano, ended up in pit orchestras in the teens. I think he's one of the youngest conductors to conduct Broadway and worked with George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Cole Porter - went out with Irvin Berlin in 1930 to Hollywood and never left.
Mercer was very clever. He knew the way Southerners spoke and put that into his lyrics. But in that whole era, you had the best. Harold Arlen was just fantastic. Cole Porter was better than anybody, and Gershwin was Gershwin, y'know. Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records, and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole.
My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.
My grandmother had always played show tunes from classic musicals at the piano when we were growing up, so that helped me fall in love with Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe, etc.
I enjoy the challenge of taking something which was not meant for the piano, distilling its essence and writing or improvising it for/at the piano, but having the listener forget that he or she is listening to a piano.
It is only by demanding the impossible of the piano that you can obtain from it all that is possible. For the psychologist this means that imagination and desire are ahead of the possible reality. A deaf Beethoven created for the piano sounds never heard before and thus predetermined the development of the piano for several decades to come. The composer's creative spirit imposes on the piano rules to which it gradually conforms. That is the history of the instrument's development. I don't know of any case where the reverse occurred.
As a kid, I took piano lessons, and I didn't like it. It wasn't cool. I was into Duran Duran and rock music. I didn't have any interest in piano. I did it for three years, and because of piano, I learned percussion. I learned scales. I learned how to sing. Piano gives you all of the basics of those things.
The piano is just a different animal. It's expensive, it's big, it's heavy, and it doesn't fit in the mix easily. Everyone grew up with a piano in their living room, so rocking out on the piano was accessible - it wasn't an upper-class thing. Now pianos have become very much a piece of furniture.
I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me
As far as songwriters, I've always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.
I was lucky enough to have the songs in my first show written by George and Ira Gershwin. Then Cole Porter wrote five shows for me.
One of my dreams was always to have a piano - a room with a piano overlooking the ocean or a lake.
The music changed. We had Irving Berlin and Gershwin and Lerner and Loewe and Cole Porter. Great music. Now we have 'Rent.'
I started playing the piano when I was 6 years old 'cause my folks tried to get me away from the gramophone. And I just - I lived for music since I could think. And they got me piano lessons. So by the time I was 13, I was quite an accomplished piano player and musician.
I can play piano, and I write everything on piano, but I don't really feel like a piano player, necessarily.
I like the piano - I'm always about 15 feet away from a piano.
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