Jamming Quotes

Acting engenders and harbours qualities that are best left way behind in adolesence. People-pleasing, going on those interviews and jamming your whole personality into getting the job, ingratiating yourself to people you wouldn`t f***ing spit on if they were on fire.

When I was five, I got forced into taking piano lessons. And it came really naturally to me. Knowing that I was good at something played an important role in my confidence. I was always shy, uncomfortable around people. I slipped by. But with the music, I didn`t. I got into bands. I studied trumpet and saxaphone a little bit. It got to the point where my teacher was like, you can be a concert pianist. But the last thing I wanted to hear at 15 is, well, you`re not fitting in now, how about dropping out of school, studying all the time and becoming a concert pianist? It sounds like "penis." Even earlier, Kiss had changed my world. It seemed evil and scary-the embodiment of rebelliousness when you`re age 12 and starting to get hair on your balls. Also, my dad, who I`d not lived with since I was 5, got me an electric piano. He had a little music store that sold acoustic instruments in the back room, where me and a couple other guys started jamming in terrible garage bands. I realized that music wasn`t all about learning a piece on the piano.

The first eight songs we were using someone else`s monitors and it is hard to follow the changes when you are jamming if you can`t hear those who you are jamming with.

It`s very hard to write a song alone. It`s only by jamming that you can get a song together.

When we were making Speaking in Tongues and Remain in Light, we were jamming. From that we were taking the best bits and then recording and improvising on top of those.

I thought Dallas tonight played their best game so far. They came at it, they were moving the puck around, jamming the net and getting a lot of traffic in front of me.

Back when I was jamming with Axl and the guys they had boxes of cassettes with song ideas. How do you know which ones you like now when you have that many ideas.

Its very sort of spontaneous and organic, not a preconceived sort of jamming. Now we record everything, cause sometimes you`ll forget, you know, `what was that thing again?` So we record everything.

But I had two very special people who helped to take my style to the next level. Thank God for my first MC Cowboy and my first student Grand Wizard Theodore, and to go out after creating this art form and finding everyone jamming to it - that too was pretty scary.

The way that we imitate each others` riffs is something that other bands don`t do as much. If we`re jamming with a jazz band, or I am jamming with a jazz band, I have to catch myself, the tendency is always to do that.

If we were just song in and song out, we`d go bananas, ... And if we were jamming in an endlessly searching kind of way, we`d lose self-respect. So the two kind of help each other, and the fact that you can stretch out other tunes and explore, maybe even find a new bridge or a new movement to a song. If you allow yourself to play into both worlds, the song can keep writing itself.