Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I found it liberating of necessity to devise my own style and my own tactics and to look for a voice on the instrument because there weren't really any that impacted strongly on me.
I am Charles Mingus, half black man, not even white enough to pass for nothing but black. I am Charles Mingus, a famed jazzman, but not famed enough to make a living in this society.
Everyone knows Mike Portnoy's reputation. He's a great drummer, and he helped us out in a great time of need. He really helped us get back underneath our feet and continue this band.
I just think music is so intrinsically linked with images in the culture that we live in that youll be hard-pressed to have an experience with the music without a preconceived notion.
So I am one of those bass players who can do something and musically, it was back then and now it is even more, if you noticed on the new album, I am not playing all the time anymore.
Nothing was a style first. Everything started as an idea. A guy did something with an idea. Someone copied him. Some copied all of them and it became trendy and then it became a style.
I just think music is so intrinsically linked with images in the culture that we live in that you'll be hard-pressed to have an experience with the music without a preconceived notion.
I'm always on the look out for 'the good image'. I'm like The Borg (you know, Star Trek) inasmuch as I assimilate everything - but I like to think I'm working in the Pop Art tradition.
The biggest reward is seeing via social media people sending me pictures back with excitement of what they bought from my fashion line. I ReTweet most everyone i see who tweets a photo.
I didn't follow the standard rules of bass playing, and many musicians on many different instruments who became noteworthy for their unique or particular style did a very similar thing.
We'll see some simplistic players for a while, who'll then get into more complicated things and evolve with their instruments. This is a cycle that happens over and over again in music.
I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs.
We absolutely cherish our kids. But the fact that we all have them - it's definitely created an additional bond. It's not just Metallica - it's our families. And we also have Metallica.
I've always had influences from all over the place, like Mr. Bungle and Primus. As a band, we try not to focus too much on where it's coming from, because we're always listening to music.
I want to get an handful of spare basses to use first of all if mine breaks, and second, to learn some things about aspects of basses that I like, so Paul can build those aspects into it.
We enjoy playing small shows, big shows, whatever. There's the energy of the visual production, and all that stuff starts to happen, so when you see it come to life, it's pretty exciting.
Lars Ulrich is not a jazz drummer, but he grew up listening to jazz. Why? Because his father, Torben - an incredible tennis player - loved jazz. Jazz musicians used to stay at their house.
Orchestra had a little brass ensemble on two tracks as well, but the rest was me. I knew I couldn't continue in this direction, even if people liked it, because I can only duplicate myself.
I can tell you I'm not exactly sure why I teach. I think a lot of it is just it's the sense of community. A real desire to be involved both with people older than myself and people younger.
I am touring in Europe. I am putting together a trio and a quartet. I am playing solo concerts with my symphonic sounds. I am very much engaged back to playing and recording and everything.
For years we've been playing and writing songs that sound happy. And yet if you listen, the words are all like "My brains are falling out of my ears; would someone please pull me together?"
We always mess around with riffs and stuff and kind of jam out during sound checks, but we never actually started playing covers live until we started goofing off a little bit more on stage.
There were a lot of different styles in the house - Motown, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, jazz - and my dad played flamenco guitar. Soon I realized that bass was what was really grooving me.
I had a band called Infectious Grooves back in the Nineties. That music was really a mixture of styles, and we had some stuff that was punk rock, ska, but then we had a lot of funk in there.
I feel that music is such an inspirational form of energy, as baseball is. And especially with Metallica, believe it or not, our shows are very physical. Sports is a very physical thing, too.
My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven. I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I'd change little things in the music and write different lyrics.
When I embraced the rock hat, when I put it on two or three years ago, when I realized I'm gonna go and make really focused rock albums, it felt like wearing an old shoe. It was a perfect fit.
When I got into songs like 'Exist,' I was like, 'Okay, this riff has some bass sweeping in it, I'm definitely going to have to use a pick... but I guess I'll have to learn how to sweep first!'
I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going.
As I matured, I've always had the dream of one day either having my own clothing line or owning a fashion magazine. Most of my thesis' and projects in school were fashion and advertising based.
How is AIDS research to progress when the premise of science is questioning but the premise of questioning HIV is considered so dangerous that even venturing into the facts is too great a risk?
If you don't already know about jazz music, how would you be exposed? How would get an opportunity to find out if it spoke to you? If you get exposed to it enough, you might find a taste for it.
I've been a baseball fan in the early part of my life, so through the '70s and the '80s, I was a huge fan. I actually followed the Dodgers back then, back in the Kirk Gibson years, Steve Garvey.
When I was younger, I had a much better connection between words and music. Somewhere along the way, I had kind of an aspiration to disconnect them, to just kind of go into a totally musical world.
There were numerous times where, at the end of a week of working on a song, there was a part of it that we still weren't feeling, so we'd scrap the whole thing and start from scratch the next week.
What we're doing is special and unique in its own way but still keeping it heavy. For me as a listener, part of the journey I'm on with Metallica, there's just a certain edge that needs to be there.
Not one song on the charts is being played naturally. But when you go see someone live it's special. Even though you can fool people, I know there are people out there who still play along to tapes.
If you listen to really deep ambient records that don't move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.
I thought it was time to get a group together and the first person I thought of was Wayne Shorter. I called Wayne and in the meantime, Wayne called me to make an album with him, which was Super Nova.
I got into dub a long time ago. I was into dub before I even had any interest in reggae or Jamaican songs, Bob Marley, or any of those established artists. I just thought it was such an unusual sound.
There's nothing wrong with struggle. Anytime I look back at a difficult phase of my life and see what grew out of it - the creative survival tactics - I think that the good is way better than the bad.
Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.
I'm not really allowed to talk about the Dead though. I think when we are at our best, we definitely do things that the Dead or no other band could do. We explore things and take things to the extreme.
Just because you can make an album on a laptop computer in your back bedroom doesn't mean it's going to be any good. Like any 'product', it has to come from a good original idea. There are no shortcuts!
Lemmy is, I think, for anybody in the world of rock n' roll - you don't have to be a bass player - he is a pioneer, and he was true to his music and also the lover of a lot of different styles of music.
We used to go to Palm Springs, ditch school when I was in eleventh grade, and go hang out poolside with our ghetto blaster and listen to Pat Metheny 'Offramp' and kind of trip out on a lot of his music.
The main thing that those two albums have in common aside from my music, which of course, a sense of it, you can recognize, it is that the bass on Infinite Search was playing much, much less like a bass.
Everybody was starting to grow long hair and wear pink suits and purple glasses and stuff and then, I suppose, some people thought we were crazy, but we weren't really crazy because we're all still here!
Life at university, with its intellectual and inconclusive discussions at a postgraduate level is on the whole a bad training for the real world. Only men of very strong character surmount this handicap.
You can have the best riff in the world, but if the drums behind it just ain't vibing it, it's not gonna be the greatest riff, right? So you've gotta have someone there that can really bring that to life.