A Quote by Philip Bailey

As young musicians, we cut our teeth on doing gigs at clubs and functions and colleges. That was really the proving ground for young musicians, learning songs, doing covers of different songs that were popular, learning different genres of music.
I remember when our first album came out. After one of our gigs, we went across the border to Mexico and the band in the bar where we were was doing covers of our songs. I don't think they understood a word they were singing but they did the songs perfectly.
School of Rock. The best music school anywhere. This whole idea of getting kids not just taking lessons and learning notes and chords, but learning songs and playing with other young musicians, and getting out on stage... I was so impressed that my daughter Cheyenne goes to School of Rock on Long Island.
Part of the joy of music is listening to lots of different kinds of music and learning from it. Specifically for me, I like writing songs that move me, and what moves me are beautiful songs on the piano or the guitar and really, really heavy music.
At the beginning of my career, I saw an opportunity to forge new ground and focus on songwriting. Not many people were doing that at the time. Pretty much nobody. I thought I could write some really cool songs that would rise above all these dozens of genres that exist within dance music. I'd make it more about the songs. For the last 20 years, I've been sharing stories of my life through music. I've been writing songs about my life.
One of the most encouraging things is to see that so many of these young musicians and worship leaders are really concerned with doing a good job representing the truth of Jesus in their songs, and not just concerned with creative and musical progression.
I would be happy if I could meet some musicians interested in different acoustics and traditional music. Maybe I will find some Native American or Latin tunes. Anything. Even maybe a great heavy metal guitar player or drummer, and we can do something wild together. My next step is making more music without formats or borders. Not just simple songs or doing covers, but music with more ideas. I think it will again be a synthesis with something else.
After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.
Orchestral musicians have a different approach than we do, and when I say 'we,' I mean musicians who don't know what they are doing.
Like many musicians, it's my roots in music, playing cover songs. I've done probably a lot more covers than the average person who does what I do, but I'm very proud of it, and I do feel like I really bring a lot artistically to these covers.
My mistakes made were learning how to work with different groups of people. I mean, I went to school at Berkeley, which is a pretty diverse group, but working in a professional setting, I hadn't really done that before and learning about office politics, learning about interactions between different people and I made a lot of mistakes there during my time as a young person. I was 19 or 20 at the time. So, I would say those were my biggest career mistakes, but fortunately they were made in the context of an engineering co-op program and not in a professional field.
I think people who basically do one thing like Eric Clapton is great. But I've always enjoyed playing different kinds of music and playing with different kinds of musicians because I find that really interesting, like learning and working with Kip Hanrahan. There's a great conga player called Milton Cardona and he taught me a lot of the nuances, he's a Santeria Priest and so he knows his onions as it were.
Neil Young does throw in a major seven chord here and there, so if you're a new guitar player learning Neil Young songs, you'll learn some seven chords, and some different positions. Nothing too complicated, just enough to kind of open up your knowledge a little bit.
I never put myself in a box. I like to have various different types of songs and different genres and situational songs. No matter is going on, I have something for that time or era.
I think the idea is that every time we perform Big Red Machine music it should be different somehow - like, different people, different songs maybe, definitely different versions of the songs.
I often call Daptone the Motown and Stax of today. But in some ways it's different. At Motown, a lot of the musicians didn't get recognized, music got stolen, and people didn't get paid. Or the label would just throw them a pinch of money for their songs. That is one thing we're not doing. Anything anyone writes here, we get a percentage.
In the beginning, the punk scene was so full of promise. All the bands were different, and all the sounds were different. The common denominator was that it was all very young kids doing it, and doing it on their terms. But then it became, 'You should listen to this and you should wear this uniform, and you shouldn't do this or that.' It was supposed to be about not having rules, but every generation of music gets watered down.
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