Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
— Wynton Marsalis
My thing is, once you start to put a backbeat on your music or something that has a machine in it, you have popularity, but you lose the flexibility. And you lose a richness.
The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.
I'm just lucky to have the type of friends and musicians and people dedicated to my music that I do.
Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It's about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.
My mother always took my brothers and me to music lessons. There were six children. Our parents attended our concerts and encouraged us to study and enjoy many different types of music.
Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
When we talk about my music, it's a cross between Tina Turner, Alanis Morrisette, and Diana Ross. It's the glamour and the showiness of Diana Ross; the ferociousness and pain of Tina Turner; and the vocals of Alanis.
— Wynter Gordon
When I first started, the very first body of music I made when I got signed to Atlantic were songs with titles like 'Unify' and 'You're Special.' And there's this song that reminds me of Meghan Trainor that I wrote, about a woman's body and not conforming, when I first started in music.
I always make music that is true to my spirit.
— Wynonna Judd
I have always loved the process of making the music, reading the letters from the fans who get married to my music, have children to my music and play my music at their funerals.
I never took a music lesson in my life, it just came naturally.
I do music for the love of it, and I've been doing it from a very young age: about 11.
— Wyclef Jean
A lot of the things I do deal with my race, but my race is who I am. I'm an American kid who grew up listening to predominantly hip-hop. I will talk about hip-hop as the music I grew up listening to, and I think sometimes people like to put it as, 'Oh, well, he's talking about black things.' And, yeah, they are, but that's my American identity.
— Wyatt Cenac
Half the time I feel like I'm appealing to the downer freaks out there. We start to play one downer record after another until I begin to get down myself. Give me something from 1960 or something; let me get up again. The music of today is for downer freaks, and I'm an upper.
— Wolfman Jack
Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Music is everything to me, and I'm most grateful that it's all working out.
— WizKid
The majority of the high schools and the public schools in N.Y.C. don't even have band programs. Hip-hop in a lot of ways is an outgrowth of a lack of instruments and a desire to play music, so we can't really fault the kids for that.
The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.
The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.
Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.
I dress up a certain way because I respect the music.
What I really have in my head, my imagination, my understanding of music, I never really get that out.
I've been working in the music industry since I was 15 years old, and I feel like I've always been ahead of my time.
My story of success and failure is not just about music and being famous. It's about living and loving and trying to find purpose in this crazy world.
I am most proud that I stayed true to the music of my soul.
When you are real in your music, people know it and they feel your authenticity.
It's been a struggle to get people to come eat for fun. You know, the way they listen to music. You can do all kinds of things with music. But food - it's something people need, and that changes everything. You start playing with it, people have all sorts of reactions.
— Wylie Dufresne
I know that the nice shines I have on is going to pass. The nice cars will pass. All that will stay is the music and the work. That's where I get the inspiration to help people out and work.
Sometimes, when you're on the streets, certain music inspires you, and then you have a vision. But, at the end of the day, it's a synthesis of visions, so you have to think, as a director, of a scene, or how to deliver a line, or how do this visually.
— Wong Kar-wai
New Yorkers think they have everything, all the best art and music. But really L.A. is a better place.
— Wolfgang Puck
Versification is, indeed, indispensable for music, but rhyme, solely for rhyming's sake, most pernicious.
Whenever I make music, I just make it depending on however I feel at that moment and what I'm getting inspiration from, so it depends - whatever, it's just my mood.
What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use the sound of my instrument to create an emotional effect.
I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are.
I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking.
Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
I never minded giving my opinions. They are just opinions, and I had studied music and I had strong feelings. I was happy for my opinions to join all the other opinions. But you have to be prepared for what comes back, especially if you don't agree with the dominant mythology.
I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?
Don't worry about what others say about your music. Pursue whatever you are hearing... but if everybody really hates your music maybe you could try some different approaches.
Making dance music was one of the best things I did in my life. I traveled the world; I met the most amazing fans. I got a lot of respect from doing it.
There's a place for all types of country music as long as there is honesty and realness and a real human experience for the fans.
Digital downloading of music has affected us all in adverse ways.
My music is about the journey, about love and the human experience.
What I'm trying to do is break the genre from what is rap and what is music.
Me and my father went through a war period where we wasn't talking. He wanted me to go to theology school - I didn't want to go. I wanted to do music. I told him I was a minister through music.
I'm not crazy about the rap thing. Or house music.
I live in a country where music has very little success, though, exclusive of those who have forsaken us, we have still admirable professors and, more particularly, composers of great solidity, knowledge, and taste.
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
— Wole Soyinka
