A Quote by Melody Gardot

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn't scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn't mine - it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.
I think that, initially, I was most passionate about music and particularly about playing the piano. I started playing when I was nine, and I was obsessed with it, really. I wouldn't even go spend the night at a friend's unless they had a piano. But I didn't have the chops, the extraordinary talent to be able to play the piano professionally.
When I was a little kid wanting to play music, it was because of people like Pete Johnson, Huey Smith, Allen Toussaint, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Art Neville ... there was so many piano players I loved in New Orleans. Then there was guys from out of town that would come cut there a lot. There was so many great bebop piano players, so many great jazz piano players, so many great Latin piano players, so many great blues piano players. Some of those Afro-Cuban bands had some killer piano players. There was so many different things going on musically, and it was all of interest to me.
The first music-learning thing that I took seriously was piano lessons when I was a kid. I guess that was probably the only time that I was forced to perform music, because I had piano recitals, and my school also had mandatory music classes that had some performing required.
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.
Music is something I couldn't live without. My dad was into music, he played for pleasure - guitar, piano. I started off doing jazz, singing with a lot of fabulous musicians here in London before I went to the States. And I still take piano lessons every Wednesday.
I learned to play piano on my own and my parents thought "Oh it would be a good thing for you take piano lessons. That's the way you really need to learn to play the piano."
I started taking piano lessons when I was about four years old. My parents were both musicians. So I took piano lessons. I didn't like the lessons very much, but I was enchanted by music. Music always transported me somewhere. Singing made feel good and being able to play the piano made me feel good.
As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.
My mom tells this story that even when I was in the womb, my father played the piano and she sang. So, before I officially got here, I was already surrounded by music. I also like the way my father explains it. When I was about 3-years old, in order to keep me quiet, my father would put me in the bassinet and either put on some music or play the piano. When he started playing, I got quiet and eventually went to sleep. He said by the time I turned 3, I just climbed up on the piano and started playing it with the attitude of I'm gonna play dis here piano.
My parents loved music, but they weren't musicians. So my musical training as a young kid was limited to piano lessons. I was not the best student; I was awful, never practiced. But I was always interested in just messing around on the piano.
When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.
I play piano, and I was really, really obsessive about playing piano in high school. I don't know if that's nerdy, but I definitely locked myself in the room and was playing jazz. I was 14. I guess that's kind of cool, actually.
Other than a few years of piano as a kid, I don't have all that much musical training. I played piano for all the musicals in high school and was in a few bands, but never really considered music as a viable career until I was in college.
There was a piano in my house, and my brother had taken lessons when I was a kid. I don't remember this, but my mom told me she came home one day and I had learned everything he had studied for a year, and I was playing it on the piano.
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.
I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then.
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