Pianist Quotes Page 2

I wanted to be a concert pianist at Carnegie Hall;

that is what I wanted to do from really early on. I actually was the accompanist for a couple of the musicals I was in growing up.

In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.

Ask any great athlete or the concert pianist or the successful actor if they have arrived at the place where they need no further practice. They will tell you that the higher you climb in proficiency and public acceptance, the greater the need for practice.

Sometimes pianists try to sound like singers: me personally, I try to sound like a Bösendorfer.

To play the piano is to consort with nature.

Every mollusk, galaxy, vapor or viper as well the sweet incense of love's distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist.

I was born in Memphis. There was music all around me, really deep and special music. I heard all these great masters at a young age.There was a great genius in my town, Phineas Newborn, who is one of the greatest pianists ever on the planet. He took me under his wings at about 9 and he put me on the right track.

I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear.

I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.

The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.

I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a childrens author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.

I was the first person in my family born in the United States.

My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist.

I started off as a studio pianist in Hollywood.

The zenith of virtuosity, a violinist like Jascha Heifetz, the supernatural in a pianist like Vladimir Horowitz, these are performers who were so idiosyncratic and personal that to imitate them would be like filling somebody else's bottle with your wine.

From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist.

The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

I'm basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I'm good. I think I'm a very poor piano player.

My dream job is being a pianist

As a pianist, our particular role is to enter a piece and its logic and create a particular interpretation from our understanding. The most important thing for the performer is, after all, to create a special atmosphere - we enter the composer's feelings and emotions and recreate them freshly for a given audience.

Classical pianist Awadagin Pratt. I first heard this eccentric and introverted performer when I was living in the Midwest. He was playing Brahms ballades - haunting.

Pianists don't argue too much generally because we have a hard enough time just getting things right. Arguing is for string players.

Just as the pianist practices the most complicated pieces to improve the technique of his fingers, so too a grandmaster must keep his vision in trim by daily analysis of positions with sharp possibilities, and this applies whether he prefers such positions in his play or not.

It seems that a lot of people, who haven't known of me as a pianist, think I've just started off as a comedian. And so for them the piano was something extra. But, of course, playing the piano was something that came before all of what's happened now.

I'm a concert pianist, that's a pretentious way of saying I'm unemployed at the moment.

You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

I don't regard myself as a great classical or jazz pianist.

I like country music, but I'm not a great player. I just like music. Drums 'n' bass is pretty exciting and I'd love to explore it.

When Hank Jones had his night off, I would get somebody to take my place as intermission pianist and I'd play the show with Ella, so I would get a chance to play with Ray Brown and Charlie Smith as well.

I decided during my teens that I wasn't going to have the life of a concert pianist, much to the chagrin of a lot of people who had put a lot of money into me!

My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.

It is my fervent wish and my greatest ambition to leave a work with a few useful instructions for the pianists after me.

My mother wanted me to be a concert pianist.

That's a very high goal to have, study eight hours a day to be a concert pianist.

I played piano for a lot of my childhood and stupidly quit.

I wish I hadn't - I could have been a great classical pianist!

Jazz is my adventure.

Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.