Quotations: Musicians on musicians

[jkudler]

yeah, likewise. i didn't remember who the principals were, but i certainly recall that specific story from time to time. it is from the bailey book i am pretty sure.

-j.

[maRi]

is it from the Bailey book, maRi?

Yes. Bailey says that "Hugh Davies is pointing to a feature of some free improvisation which might be described as mutual subversion. Some improvisors find this feature unhelpful, others thrive on it. But the MIC contained it to an unusually large degree." This is related to your comment in the other thread on what is and what isn't appropriate, I think. It's interesting to what degree the sense of appropriateness can be shared by playing partners, or their audience, and how this affects the range of possibilities and the potential for surprise in their music.

[faster]

It's interesting to what degree the sense of appropriateness can be shared by playing partners, or their audience, and how this affects the range of possibilities and the potential for surprise in their music.

I really couldn't agree more. It's one of my strongest interests in collaboration. Even subversion can be penned in in such a way.

[DarkAttraktor]

"Pop? We were experimental German influenced. We are not pop at all! How dare you call us pop?"

Andy McCluskey (OMD) self quote

[yonhosago]

Morton Feldman comparing his work and Cage's: "Cage leaves open the door; I leave open the window" [Post-Concert Discussion November 20, 1972, Buffalo, NY]

[billygomberg]

Morton Feldman comparing his work and Cage's: "Cage leaves open the door; I leave open the window" [Post-Concert Discussion November 20, 1972, Buffalo, NY]

Morty is endlessly quotable, especially on other musicians. One of my favorites is his retelling of a discussion w/Stockhausen, which I can't really recreate verbatim. Someone near their library help me out!

[MRS]

If I never again read another pithy, inane Cage or Feldman epigram, all the better for it.

[cheerios]

Cage's writing, however, isn't so bad actually, in my opinion.

[jkudler]

Morton Feldman comparing his work and Cage's: "Cage leaves open the door; I leave open the window" [Post-Concert Discussion November 20, 1972, Buffalo, NY]

Morty is endlessly quotable, especially on other musicians. One of my favorites is his retelling of a discussion w/Stockhausen, which I can't really recreate verbatim. Someone near their library help me out!

"My past experience was not to 'meddle' with the material, but use my concentration as a guide to what might transpire. I mentioned this to Stockhausen once when he had asked me what my secret was. 'I don't push the sounds around.' Stockhausen mulled this over, and asked: 'Not even a little bit ?"

[free math]

The Frogs are often dismissed by "serious" music fans. These people do not have the slightest idea. If I bothered to dissect their career (all 16-18 year of it) for those of you who don't already get it, it would take me a thousand words just to get to the part where we start talking about music.

These two guys are so matter-of-fact brilliant that they rifle through and exhaust ideas faster than you or I or anybody else could even recognize them. The Frogs have hours of their spontaneous songwriting (their "Make-Up Songs" takes) to play for you as evidence that their off-the-cuff output could take any five "songsmiths" and make a hood ornament out of them"

They have the unspoken immediacy of communication that the great songwriting teams of history had. Ideas, themes, tangents and lyrical perspectives don't need to be explained and dissected the way they are in conventional "bands." Dennis or Jimmy will just go off, and the other immediately knows when to change, for example, into T. Rex mode, or prison a capella mode, or vaudeville Christian sing-a-long mode, or death-obsessed teen tragedy (with puberty-conscious references to peer pressure) mode, or sexual incompatibility of Greek gods and mortals mode, or so-self-conscious-it-makes-you-cringe-that-you're-actually-tapping-you-foot-to-a-song-about-a-guy-who-only-fucks-babies-and-that-this-particular-baby-is-really-getting-into-it mode.

In short, anybody who thinks the Frogs are "simple," "shallow," or "limited," in scope, well, that fella don't know shit from fat meat.

Steve Albini
--
every bit as choice as three-month-old Baby Greaser George

from the rerelease of My Daughter the Broad on Jim O'Rourke's Moikai label

[Gerardo A]

“I heard that session of Benny Goodman and Lester Young together on the radio today. Benny was playing that clarinet, so full of vibrato, and then Lester came in, so clean and pure, and I started weeping. No one else has meant so much to me.”

Lee Konitz, quoted by Ethan Iverson.

[Yii]

i don't know whether it mentioned or not, "Jim Hall plays Scelsi"(Keith Rowe on Taku Sugimoto).

[Gerardo A]

i don't know whether it mentioned or not, "Jim Hall plays Scelsi"(Keith Rowe on Taku Sugimoto).

Two more musician quotes on Taku Sugimoto:

“Bailey plays Feldman.” Donald Miller

“Concept sensei!” Radu Malfatti

[Steve Minkin]

Found this in a old NYTimes Sunday crossword I just did:
"Most rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."
Frank Zappa

[faster]

"I am not Don anymore and not Dan either (yet). Nor am I a serpent, a temptress of my own destiny. I was a man once, a woman once, a Don once." - Dan Brown (on Don Brown), Letter to Dan Reynolds, September 2010.