You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.
I get the most starstruck around musicians. I get tongue-tied and don't know what to say. I'm so jealous of them. When you make a movie, you're constructing something - it's a little bit like making an album. But after musicians make an album, they get to perform it live and experience it in front of a crowd.
Musicians tend to get bored playing the same thing over and over, so I think it's natural to experiment.
Blues musicians don't retire. They drop.
The first time I hung out with [David Blaine], he took me to this condemned building, and it had a pizza oven and he crawled into the pizza oven and turned the heat on to 400 degrees or something like that, and he stayed in it for I guess a half hour. He came out, and except for one or two second-degree burns, he was unscathed. You meet a lot of musicians and filmmakers and actors, but it's rare to meet someone who can step inside a pizza oven and take the heat. I was intrigued by that.
As comedians, we have the opportunity to convey a message that will have an effect. The best can make you laugh and cry, the way musicians and actors can.
I find myself, the more I grow up the more I hang around creatives, musicians. I find them more inspiring to be around. I'd probably say that. The more creative you are - I get along with them better. There is more of an understanding.
She [Joni Mitchell] wanted to have that (jazz) element in her music. Of course, when she heard Jaco's [Jaco Pastorius'] music and met him, that floored her -- really grabbed her. She decided that Wayne Shorter was really conducive to her music. She would speak metaphorically about things. "I want this to sound like a taxicab driver, or a taxi in New York," or "I want this to sound like a telephone ringing. " She would speak to musicians like that, and we really tuned into what she would want our music to be.
You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.
When you work with great musicians, they are always a part of you. . . their spirits are walking around in me, so they're still here and passing it on to others.
What people really should be able to be confident in is that the standards of music- making that classically trained musicians present is elite, it is the best and all of us as artists should be committed to that.
I know a lot of great musicians that don't know they're even great, because mangers try and make them feel belittled like they're not worth a crap.
When a lot of musicians change styles, their songwriting suffers because they want to be different.
[Jazz musicians ] couldn't cut rock. I had to be more limited and specific about what I was doing.
There are more bad musicians than there is bad music.
Really good musicians don't think of "self-reflection".
I'm all in favor of getting grants for musicians. Or any other good brand of Scotch.
When it comes to musicians, I'm like the daddy of musicians here in Cuba.
I think musicians are perfect at knowing how to get the best out of other musicians. I can really relate to that communion.
I'm a spiritual musician, I think there has been enough political musicians and I think everything that can be said has been said about political, social things, you know, and there's still some more to be said but not much.