A musician's whole life is to listen.
Interpretation
The essence of a musician's life revolves around active listening and understanding music.
This quote emphasizes the fundamental role of listening in a musician's existence. For musicians, deep listening goes beyond merely hearing notes; it is about perceiving nuances, emotions, and the essence of music. This profound connection nurtures their creativity and performance, shaping their artistic expression.
In practice
During a lecture on music appreciation, I shared this quote to highlight the importance of attentive listening.
Swing is extreme coordination. It's a maintaining balance, equilibrium. It's about executing very difficult rhythms with a panache and a feeling in the context of very strict time. So, everything about the swing is about some guideline and some grid and the elegant way that you negotiate your way through that grid.
Many of our greatest musicians abandoned all of their aesthetic objectives to try to become pertinent. And, at the end of the day, they never became pop stars. I counter stated that very strongly, and I continue to do that.
Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.
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 Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.
Music helps you find the truths you must bring into the rest of your life.
Beauty is truth's smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.
I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia, and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question.
The picture is not made by the photographer, the picture is more good or less good in function of the relationship that you have with the people you photograph.
I think of myself as a performance artist. I hate being called a pop star. I hate that.
The same God who created Rembrandt created you, and you are as precious in Godβs sight as Rembrandt or anyone else.
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