Pastoral Resources

They sign a bunch of women, and they call it a movement. I don't like the way women in music have been identified as women first and musicians second.

You know, musicians aren't very stable, in case you hadn't noticed.

When we came into the studio I became more and more me, making the tracks and choosing the musicians, partly because a great deal of the time during Bridge, Artie wasn't there.

We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.

Just look at the Old Testament. They didn't go out with the army first. They sent the musicians out.

I had sort of exhausted all the avenues playing in Detroit. So again, through the stewardship of my brother, I ended up in California and went to the Musicians Institute in L.A. I wanted to get better as a player.

The thing with me. I can't stick musicians. I've thought about this. I can't stand them, and being stuck in a studio with them I think that's my strength I can hear what they can't.

I've heard from writers and musicians and fans that they think I'm underrated.

There are more bad musicians than there is bad music.

Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo.

And I'm always interested when other musicians are trying to discover new worlds of sound.

Whenever I felt happy about having discovered something, the first encounter, not only with the public, with other musicians, with specialists, etc, was that they rejected it.

A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.

People are afraid to ask musicians to be involved in projects because they anticipate being turned down. Young artists hesitate before contacting me. People in my position don't get approached often enough.

The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

The Blues scene now is international. In the '50s it was purely something that you would hear in black clubs, played by black musicians, especially in America. But from the '60s onwards it changed.

I believe musicians have a duty, a responsibility to reach out, to share your love or pain with others.

I don't take compliments very easily. I think most musicians suffer from low self-esteem to some extent.

All of these people kept on being professional musicians and composers in the strictest sense.

Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians.