Popularity: 0
Vote:   | And consequently there's not a lot of artist development, very little encouragement to take chances on anything, to do anything new or different. Same old, same old. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | And I think that in the case of these last few - the musicians I had - the reasons I used the same people I did on the two albums was I really felt that these guys were not only great players in their own right but really understood the concept of functioning as a band. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | And record companies are always quick to blame piracy and the Internet but I think that's only a small part of it. I think it's the corporate bottom line mentality. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | But certainly the idea of making records that had a mainstream appeal instrumentally was nothing that we invented. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | But hey, look, I became a musician because I love music. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | But I never had any illusions at that time that it was going to be how I was going to make a living. I thought, well, I'll make a solo record, and it'll be fun. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I basically played the music that I felt all my life, and whatever label people put on it is kind of really none of my business. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I did full demos of all the songs at home, and then I took the demos into the studio and played them for everybody, and we then went ahead and did live versions. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I did the first album, and it did much better than anyone expected. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I didn't go on the road until right after my second album. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I do this because I love it, and at the end of the day, the fact that I can make a living at all doing this, I'm grateful for. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I don't see any way out of that because I think the audience as a whole is not being served and isn't getting excited about going out an buying CD's, and for that matter, going out and going to concerts. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I hope this doesn't sound like false humility, because I don't mean it to, but I'm just a member of the band. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I know guys that live in New York, but I never see them play because they're always out on the road. I run into them in Europe. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I listen to some things that I've done, and I think they're pretty good, but that's not one of them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I love working with these guys. But I certainly don't begrudge them when they want to go off and do their own stuff. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I remember one summer, right after my second album came out, James Taylor was nice enough to allow us to open for him. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I sat in with them, and I remember their jaws dropped. I could actually play. I had some degree of sense of time. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I segued immediately into Stevie Wonder. Butterfield's band broke up, and the next week I got the gig with Stevie Wonder. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | I started out, obviously, as a sideman, and I had some really good gigs as a sideman. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I thin especially people that have very distinctive sounds and styles or people that have certain malleability in terms of how they can play different styles in coloristic ways. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I think as different songs kind of cross your path from one source or another, I approach them with the idea of, can I get inside this song and really kind of inhabit it and bring something of myself into that song? |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think Norah Jones is a perfect example. Here's somebody who was playing the music she wanted to play and did it with some conviction, and it happened to be at a moment in time when there was a highly receptive audience for that kind of music. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think that that's the way the music grows and changes and becomes new and creative and vital. It's by synthesizing elements from all around it and not to maintain this kind of rigid myopic kind of tunnel vision, in a sense, trying to maintain a certain kind of purity, or whatever. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I think the kind of chronology of the whole thing was that I was making records in the 70's and 80's that used pop production values, but instrumental music; like improvising with R&B kinds of song structures, but with improvisation in them, and pop production values. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think the problem is when a genre or style becomes limiting, when it starts to define what you're going to do, then it becomes a problem. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think ticket prices are too high, but it costs so bloody much money to get anything together anymore. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I think with the acoustic bass it allows you to explore the fuller dynamic range. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I was playing with James Taylor at the time. James agreed to let me open for him, if I played with him also. So I got to be the opening act and I got a lot of exposure that way. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | I'd been doing a syndicated radio show. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'll just sit at the piano a lot an play like through different chord exercises and kind of just throwing my hands down on the piano from one chord to the next to see what happens. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I'm just saying that the basic concept of creative freedom and growth creatively is a continuous process. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I'm one of those people that wants to bring a lot of disparate elements together. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm somebody that pretty much operates by instinct, and I kind of have to follow my instincts. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm trying to kind of keep my mind a blank for a while, and just see what filters in, and be non-specific about what I listen to. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized and there's just no outlet, there's no venue for it, in terms of media. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Its all about finding the right note at the right place and knowing when to leave well enough alone. And that's a lifelong quest. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Maybe I call the shots, but it's not about them and me. It's about me as a part of everything. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Mostly because I don't really feel that I have a methodology. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | My manager and I had been talking about trying to do a TV show. There was a series of shows back in the '50s, where they'd get a bunch of musicians together and they'd jam. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | My name is on the thing, but the reality of it is, when I get up there on stage, I'm part of a band. I'm part of a unit. It's like a basketball team. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | My recollection of listening to radio was listening to a personality on the radio play music that he was connected with, and having a wide variety of music to play. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | My whole contention, and my feeling in general about radio is, not just jazz radio, or smooth jazz radio, or whatever-radio in general is, I would like to see a little more variety within each one station. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | No, it's unfair to the musicians and the people that work for the record labels, because they're scrambling to make their numbers every month or three months, or they're out of a job. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | People who really understood the use of space and the fact that the sound and the silence are of equal weight and that what you're doing is really manipulating space. It's the same as a painting except that you're doing it aurally. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Pop used to actually routinely sell 10 million records. Now if they get there at all it takes them quite awhile. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | So I get it worked out beforehand so I can be really efficient in the studio. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Somebody like George Coleman has an approach and a pedagogical approach to teaching and can really kind of lay it out with exercises and demonstrations and different things that will improve your playing. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | The audience is interested in different stuff, not the same old, same old. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The music is going to change anyway, whether or not the record companies get behind it or not. The music is there, and it's happening, and it's going on out there. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The problem often times with trying to recreate some moment is that you kind of try to do part two or a sequel. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | They thought there was a market out there for instrumental music. They were trying to broaden their roster of artists. I got in on that. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | To me, a record needs to have a focus. It needs to have a core. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Usually there's some kind of clue, whether it's a rhythmic foundation or sometimes its very abstract - just an emotional kind of landscape - and then you just kind of start someplace. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | We were in Europe, and what's great about going to Europe, is you get a chance to hear a lot of really great music. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We're living in an age now where that's the business model. And it's kind of hard to operate economically in that kind of climate because it stifles creativity. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Well I think that one of the things that I've learned over the years - some of it by experience and growth, and some of it just by the gradual physical falling away at certain things - that its really important to try to make less mean more. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Well, I did all the pre-production and I did full demos of all the songs and then I took it into the studio and played it for all the guys and then we kind of took that as the template and did the album live very quickly. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to what? |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Well, I had been doing albums that were a little more pop/commercial and it was really only reflecting one side of my playing and I felt the need to express another side of myself. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Well, I really enjoyed the process of making the last album so much that it's like kind of not wanting the party to end in a way. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Well, if I'm really playing, I'm hopefully not thinking. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | When you have an acoustic bass in the ensemble it really changes the dynamic of the record because it kind of forces everybody to play with a greater degree of sensitivity and nuance because it just has a different kind of tone and spectrum than the electric bass. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You might have a slight edge in terms of leverage if you've had some past success, but I don't think that really goes very far. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | You're only as good as your last record. |