A Quote by Terry Riley
Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.
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And we would play together, like fine musicians should, And it would sound like music, and the music would sound good. But in real life I'm stuck with that same old formula, me and my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.
A lot of times I use live musicians, but I don't want it to have that live funky sound so I'll just take the best loop of a drum part and repeat it over and over and over again so that there's consistency and it feels a little bit more programmed. But I have a love/hate relationship with comping as well.
It's so easy to make albums with overdubbing and editing these days, but I really prefer playing live and just getting the music to sound right because the musicians, the songs and the performances are good.
Ultimately, what we do as musicians, I think of us as a type of emotional engineer. We essential take these sound waves, this sound, and we organize it into emotion, and that's how we connect with our audiences.
She [Joni Mitchell] wanted to have that (jazz) element in her music. Of course, when she heard Jaco's [Jaco Pastorius'] music and met him, that floored her -- really grabbed her. She decided that Wayne Shorter was really conducive to her music. She would speak metaphorically about things. "I want this to sound like a taxicab driver, or a taxi in New York," or "I want this to sound like a telephone ringing." She would speak to musicians like that, and we really tuned into what she would want our music to be.
My music, it breathes. It's the mysticism of sound. I'm a sound seeker, and I'm enthralled with it, by what it can do to change the molecules and uplift people. They feel something when we play. I can't take authorship for that. I can take that I'm in service.
A record can make an artist sound in tune or make the music sound pretty. But the real test is performing live, and I think we pass fairly well, because people keep asking to see us play.
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.
One of the main things I look for in a guitarist is in the sound itself. I go for a certain sound, and I think it's an important thing for making a player more identifiable in the big giant pool of musicians out there. You want a sound that people will recognise just as much as your playing.
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.
Some musicians make and record music; other musicians play in a band... I just make and record music, and I don't feel a part of anything in any music business.
I think experimentation with other stuff is great. My real focus has been more-so trying to create a sound that I can build upon and get really comfortable with. I think almost everything is experimentation 'til you find what it is that your sound is.
You take a sound, any sound, record it and then change it's nature by a multiplicity of operations. You record it at different speeds; you play it backwards; you add it to itself over and over again. You adjust filters, echoes, acoustic qualities…you produce a vast and subtle symphony. It's a sort of modern magic. We think there's something in it. Some musicians believe it may become an art form in its own right.
All it takes to become president is money and a certain kind of power. Being president is the first thing I can shoot for, not the highest. It may come to a point where people take rock and roll musicians more seriously than they take politicians. It may eventually turn out that musicians have more credibility.
I'd rather call it "instrumental creative music," especially the music that I've been doing. If a person would hear that music, they would undoubtedly call it "jazz." There is this whole generation of musicians that are playing and thinking critically for themselves and making music that's relevant to today. I hope that's the objective of a lot of musicians.
I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.'
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