Quotes on Musicians

To all the musicians, to the Academy, with all due respect, reggaeton is part of our Latin culture. And its representing as much as any other genre at the worldwide level.

It's an endless proving of myself, that I really am a musician, that I have something to offer in the room. That women can be musicians, women can be rock stars, women can be more than an objectified idea of a pop star.

If you do something, you should do it because you love it, and you should follow your heart and make it how your heart wants it to be made. But it's a difficult world, especially for musicians.

You should play with real musicians; the best music comes from real people interacting with each other.

The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery.

The hardest thing with musicians is getting them not to play.

We've now got a whole generation of jazz musicians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We've grown up alongside rappers and DJs; we've heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane.

I don't think people go to musicians for their political points of view. I think your political point of view is circumstances and then how you were nurtured and brought up.

With pop music and pop musicians, you know everything about everyone all the time, particularly their physical appearance. With female musicians, that's made a big thing of, and I think people, certainly with me, have appreciated a bit of mystery.

I pride myself on working with great musicians.

I think all musicians have at one time or another experienced one physical problem or another. I have had tendinitis a couple of times, so I try to be really careful. It takes patience and persistence to overcome injury.

I think my biggest musical hero growing up was probably Ian MacKaye. He set a great example for all of us local musicians. Still, to this day, I see him as the best example of a right-on musician.

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.

His belief in the power of music to convey ideas - not just entertain - has filtered down to musicians in every field, from alt-rock to hip-hop, from Bruce Springsteen and U2 to Arcade Fire and Kanye West. Popular music is different because of Johnny Cash.

A musician's whole life is to listen.

I think a lot of people who want to be musicians terrify their parents because they don't have a living example of it in their families, and I did. So I always knew that it was possible.

I'm a musician, and I feel like musicians owe it to themselves and owe it to music to concern themselves with as much of music as interests them. Even if you decide that you're never going to compose, you will be a better performer if you concern yourself with the craft of composition.

I enjoy reading about the lives of musicians, and find many similarities in their ideas of preparation and their utter devotion to this great, eternal language: music.

Artists, musicians, scientists - if you have any kind of visionary aptitude, it's often something that you don't have a choice in. You have to do it.

There's no difference in a lot of people's minds between good musicians and popular musicians.

New Orleans cats don't play a lot of solos unless they got something to say. It's not an ego thing like it is with some other musicians. You say what you gotta say and then shut up.