Vintage

Hazrat Inayat Khan

"The more one studies the harmony of music, and then studies human nature, how people agree and how they disagree, how there is attraction and repulsion, the more one will see that it is all music."
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan

I found this quote buried in my palm pilot which I am vacating for something new. It reminds me of something I once wrote, Jazz Is Life.

Here are some others I found:

"Love what you play. Only if you love each note that comes out, whatever it is, only then can you concentrate on the next note, rather than spending your focus on judging how well your previous notes were."
-- Kenny Werner

This is from Kenny Werner's Efforless Mastery, a book I would highly recommend to anyone, especially musicians. I think this line from the book really sums it up. We should probably apply this to all things we do in life.

I found this next quote posted on an Internet forum from back in 2000 by someone named Henk Meulstee. Henk wrote:

I was fortunate to watch Miles Davis play at the North Sea Jazz festival in the Hague, Holland, when in the break a woman came to him and asked,"Can't you play something I can understand?" Whereto Miles replied: "Lady, it took me 5o years to learn and develop my music and you think you can just walk in here and understand it in 45 minutes?"

I feel that way when I'm playing Roland Kirk's Black Root with Leonard and the Lab Rats, (except of course I haven't been playing for 50 years and I'm not Miles). I love playing that song, but I get the feeling that the audience just thinks we're tuning our instruments. We get little or no response by the end of it. But somehow it still feels worth it, at least once in a while.

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