Musicians From England

"My God! is any hour so sweet, From blush of morn to evening-star, As that which calls me to Thy feet,— The hour of prayer?"

"Lord! till I reach yon blissful shore, No privilege so dear shall be, As thus my inmost soul to pour In prayer to Thee."

"The hardest thing to do is to swing quietly, with control and restraint. Lots of bands swing loudly. I refuse to let my band play loudly in order to try to swing when it isn’t swinging softly. I think that the best jazz in the long run is the jazz that is controlled and will swing on its own terms."

"Forget the word youth – this is one of the best bands you'll ever hear."

"I have never looked like being in that incredible virtuoso class like, say, Stan Getz. I think people made a mistake and put me in that embryonic class when I was very young and thought that I was going to branch out to be a big instrumentalist in some way or another. But I always find that I very, very seldom get anywhere near what I consider a satisfactory standard. I would much rather be judged for my writing because writing is a thing that you can have second thoughts about and, if it isn’t right, you can’t blame somebody else but yourself."

"It is not governed by the senseless world of current style that pervades and pollutes popular music, nor is it part of an established hierarchy, so that it is cloistered and protected."

"Jazz today can be spiritual, cerebral, motivating or moving. It can evoke tension, relaxation, laughter, tears. Surely jazz is truly the music of the era, combining stature, dignity and emotion with the highest musical ideals."

"Couth, kempt and shevelled."

"You put your right arm in, Your right arm out In, out, in, out and shake it all about. You do the hokey cokey and you turn around, And that's what it's all about."

"Disobey Defy Take your own time Fly"

"While the children laughed I was always afraid Of the smile of the clown So I close my eyes Till I can't see the light And I hide from the sound We're two of a kind Silence and I We need a chance to talk things over Two of a kind Silence and I"

"Time, flowing like a river Time, beckoning me Who knows when we shall meet again If ever But time Keeps flowing like a river To the sea"

"Jesus, my life is Thine, And ever more shall be Hidden in Thee, For nothing can untwine Thy life from mine."

"I take this pain, Lord Jesus, From Thine own hand; The strength to bear it bravely Thou wilt command. I am too weak for effort, So let me rest, In hush of sweet submission On Thine own breast."

"Oh, give Thine own sweet rest to me, That I may speak with soothing power A word in season, as from Thee, To weary ones in needful hour."

"All the lessons He shall send Are the sweetest: And His training, in the end, Is completest."

"Earthly joy can take but a bat-like flight, always checked, always limited, in dusk and darkness. But the love of Christ breaks through the vaulting, and leads us up into the free sky above, expanding to the very throne of Jehovah, and drawing us still upward to the infinite heights of glory."

"It is not that I feel less weak, but Thou Wilt be my strength. It is not that I see Less sin, but more of pardoning love in Thee, And all-sufficient grace. Enough! And now All fluttering thought is stilled; I only rest, And feel that Thou art near, and know that I am blest."

"Upon Thy word I rest. So strong, so sure: So full of comfort blest, So sweet, so pure — The word that changeth not, that faileth never! My King, I rest upon Thy word forever."

"If washed in Jesus' blood, Then bear His likeness too, And as you onward press Ask, "What would Jesus do?""

"Only, stay by his side Till the page is really known, It may be we failed because we tried To learn it all alone, And now that He would not let us lose One lesson of love (For He knows the loss,) — can we refuse?"

"Jesus, Master, I am Thine; Keep me faithful, keep me near; Let Thy presence in me shine All my homeward way to cheer. Jesus, at Thy feet I fall, Oh, be Thou my All in All."

"What He tells thee in the darkness, Weary watcher for the day, Grateful lip and heart should utter When the shadows flee away."

"Oh to be my verse an answering gleam from higher radiance caught"

"....We write our lives indeed, But in a cipher none can read, Except the author"

"Teach us, Master, how to give All we have and are to Thee; Grant us, Saviour, while we live, Wholly, only Thine to be."

"Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized."

"I was given so much advice. About how my hair should be, what I should wear, which competitions I should enter, what stuff I should play. None of that was relevant for me. I just had a kind of instinct."

"What was most odd was that teachers would tell you what to do and what to think and they would write everything on a blackboard and you would copy it all down." The Evening Standard - 04/07/2002"

"I wasn't part of that hothouse thing. I didn't go to the Yehudi Menuhin school. I grew up with the idea of trying to make music available to people of all abilities." The Guardian - 26/05/2000"

"I'm trained quite classically but quite freely by my mum, so even when I was little, I had this rather freewheeling approach. When I trained more seriously in my late teens at college, it was: here are the notes, here is what is expected of you. I didn't mind because you need technique, particularly on the piano, which requires a lot of stamina. And it was natural that once I had done that, I would want to go beyond classical music. How can you be yourself if all you do is reproduce someone else's notes?" The Guardian - 05/10/2001"

"School was strange, rather amusing - with a teacher standing at the front telling you what to write. The camaraderie was interesting. I tend to remember the things you can't recreate on your own - queuing up for your dinner, learning team games, which were a complete mystery to me. I remember having to pretend I knew how to play hockey, that kind of thing." The Mail on Sunday - 06/02/2000"

"I've played Bach since I was a little girl. I can't let a day go by without playing him. He's so witty and secretive and funny and mathematical and brilliant."

"I used to do Grade Exams, but my mum will tell you I didn't over-practise for them at all. I never practised, just played. I loved to play. I loved to play a lot* If one mistake is made with young children, it is trying to make them practise rather than just letting them play.' She played hymns at church ('My parents were very religious when we were young') and 'all the Top of the Pops number ones next morning at school. Things like David Bowie's "Life On Mars". That's got a very good piano part. And ever since I was six or seven years old, I always liked Bach - that's why I recorded the Anna Magdalene Notebook, little 16-bar preludes that Bach wrote for children.' I was amazed at how serious the other kids were about the whole thing, much more disciplined than I was, and with this attitude of "Ooh, I can't play sports because I might hurt my fingers" or "I can't listen to pop music because that's really terrible."

"You don't rely on a great army of people to spoon-feed you. Today's classical-music world is very self-defeating. I love the fact that all these corporations are falling apart. They're sinking millions into acts and getting it wrong. And I know why - it's not about the music, or the audiences. So in many ways this is a very encouraging time."

"I didn't go to school until I was 11. On your own you develop imagination."

"Classical musicians can sometimes get very hung up on the idea that there's a right way and there's a wrong way. You can see this destroy a lot of players. Jazz musicians have a way of understanding that there are a lot of different ways of doing things. That's what's great about them, they're so friendly. And they are so individualistic - that's why they can accept someone like me."

"Classical music has struggled to keep up. Unlike any other art form, it keeps on looking backwards all the time. It used to have a real museum culture. Then it went: "Oh my God, what are we going to do? Call for Nigel Kennedy. Quick!" Classical musicians have got to change or die,' she asserts strongly, 'but they just don't know how to. Audiences for classical music have dropped. The old blue rinse audience is dying out, and young people aren't coming in."

"As I get older I realise that start has made me rather, well, different. It set down a tremendous template for the rest of my life. I grew up believing the piano is a great instrument because you can play everything on it."

"We're really not very good about putting music in a social and political context, particularly classical music. It's all sort of above everything. But in South Africa, everything is politicised. You play a piece of classical music out there and you are making a real cultural statement. Or you play with a marimba band and you are saying something else. I think that's the way things should be. The way people write about music makes it seem completely devoid of social context. And audiences drift away as a result."

"The freedom of improvising over a bass line disappeared from music only in the 19th century, and we're still paying for it. There's a culture among classical musicians of being passive, and it stems from following the notes, rather than one's own instincts."

"Being a specialist is a 20th century thing, and now rather old fashioned as an idea. I realised early on that you can be the kind of superstar who jets around playing the same programmes all over the world, or you can be the sort of musician who perhaps can be a little influential."

"My favorite composers tend to be great improvisers as well as great players. It doesn't matter whether they're contemporary or classical."

"You can give music variation without changing the notes. When you get close to a piece there will inevitable be tinkering. I sometimes wonder if concert pianists expend so much effort and energy finding new ways to interpret that what they really need is some more direct form of self-expression."

"As a professional I practice six or seven hours per day, though it depends on my schedule. That's how it is as a musician. It's only when you reach grade five you take them more serious. Until then I saw it as fun. I used to learn them by play pop tunes on the piano. They have harmonies and broken chords and can be used as building blocks to help you with scales."

"The musicians who interest me most are people like Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh, Django Bates. They are not just writing music but performing it, recording it, putting tours together and running their own labels. That is what real musicians are, rather than over-publicised specialists."

"My education was very intensive and I applied that training later on to playing the piano. I had always played, but having no one to compare myself to, I had no idea if I was any good."

"I think there is an incredible crisis now of how we train performers. Their training encourages them to behave as though they are back in the 19th century, and they are not allowed to get out of that box very much. 'If they play a tiny bit of contemporary music, it's looked on as a bit eccentric, and it's sort of tolerated instead of absolutely encouraged. And they certainly can't improvise, and they find it difficult to encounter jazz or jazz styles. 'I think they're all waking up to this, and it's very difficult for them, because the training and the value systems that get put on them go against what we all know to be the real world. Musicians do want to break out of these constraints. It's slightly boring to just play the same cycle of pieces over and over again."

"A lot of musicians are going to have to retrain. It's nonsense to say that traditional classical music is more complex. Contemporary pieces by Harrison Birtwistle are much harder to play than Mozart or Wagner. I know a lot of people don't want to hear that."

"I want to move away from complexity. I've done my time as far as virtuosity and piles of notes are concerned. It's what puts me off a lot of contemporary classical music - there are so many notes. In fact, I think I'm moving away from classical music altogether. I'm not sure that in 10 years' time I'll be playing it at all."