APHORISMS

About the electric bass and phrases by (or about) electric bass players

We needed to free the bass player from the big doghouse, the acoustic bass.
Leo Fender

For me the electric bass is the pulsating heart of a track, the essence of the rhythm, the place from where every song springs.
James Brown

My name is John Francis Pastorius III, and I am The greatest electric bass player in the world.
Jaco Pastorius

I like singers. I listened a lot to Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, James Brown, Otis Redding.
That’s how I feel my music. That ‘human’ sound you’re talking about, it comes from singers.
Jaco Pastorius

The sound is in my hands
Jaco Pastorius

How Stravinskij said, no good composers borrow…they steal!
Jaco Pastorius

Q (Cork Green): “What do you feel are the most fundamental aspects of theory or technique to work on in mastering the bass-or any instrument? Do you practice scales and arpeggios, what sort of exercises would you recommend, especially for meter and stamina?”
A (Jaco Pastorius): “All scales & arpeggios in all keys, modes, minors etc.; piano theory (inversions, jazz chords, ear training); Bach; Charlie Parker music.”

Jaco was a self-learner, not only with his instrument, or in the composition, but even in the recording studio. This man knew how to work, and did it well.
Ingrid Pastorius

You always need to buy a good “Precision”, whenever, if you find one.
John Entwhistle

I remember when I listened to Los Angeles, the record by X that has been the album of my initiation to rock music: I was in Australia, my native country, in the middle of nowhere. I started to circle as a madman, a liberating energy appropriated of me, it entered me in the bones and I was regurgitating it. It made me feel free, beautiful, excited. In that precise moment I understood that it had to be my job: to make people feel in that way. And to make myself happy too. To extend that intangible, marvellous feeling to a whole life.
Flea

We’re trying to establish an entertaining kind of music. We’re not trying to deliver any heavy message, just entertainment… when you’re off from work, come and see us and have a good time. No moral issues, no heavy problems… you just come to see us, have a good time and split… that’s it. We’re just trying to have a good time.
Bernard Edwards

Tablature is a bunch of shit and has delayed the musical growth of many musicians who use it. Tablature is not an existing form of music. It never shows up on a studio session, it never shows up on a gig. It never shows up in music of any kind in any way, shape or form except when it is used by guitar magazines or rock solo transcriptions. It is a complete fallacy. It is in use today because musicians will not learn the language of music that has been proven to work for 400 years.
To be quite honest, tablature is a musical version of how they teach a chimp to do tricks. That chimp has no idea what he is actually doing. He just knows that once he does the trick, he is going to be rewarded for it.
Jeff Berlin

Years after that first gig, Tell heard a story about Bill Wyman, bassist of The Rolling Stones. According to the story, Wyman actually nodded off during a performance — not in some tiny club, mind you, but in a huge hall — and fell from the stage, breaking his collarbone. Tell supposed lots of people thought the story was apocryphal, but he himself had an idea it was true… and he was, after all, in a unique position to understand how something like that could happen. Bassists were the invisible men of the rock world. There were exceptions — Paul McCartney, for one — but they only proved the rule.
Perhaps because of the job’s very lack of glamor, there was a chronic shortage of bass players.
…Tell liked playing in the band. You were up front, looking down on everyone else, not just at the party but making the party happen; you were simultaneously almost invisible and absolutely essential. Every now and then you had to sing a little back-up, but nobody expected you to make a speech or anything.
Stephen King (from Nightmares & Dreamscapes)

When I started David Crosby put his name as a producer, so the record company didn’t get in my way, and I could make the music I wanted. Too bad then the musicians arrived, all with their own idea of how to play. The worst were the bass players, because they always want to know what the root note of the chord is!
Joni Mitchell

The bass player is the center of the band, the one who holds everything together.
Roberto Vecchioni

The Fender bass made the rhythm section king.
Max Bennett

About the double bass and phrases by double bass players

It’s enough a simple well performed scale of C to know the value of the musician.
Giovanni Bottesini

Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.
Charles Mingus

Take one like me, that plays the double bass since was fourteen years old. I have followed its evolution: from a simple plucking instrument in two times to the complete freedom of musicians like Stanley Clarke… I found myself in situations when the colleagues incited me: “You are free”; and I answered: “Wait a moment, I don’t know if I want to”. I played with young musicians that don’t know anything but freedom. They don’t know how to play in time and how it can be appreciated… Yet I like what has happened to the bass today. Some of the young musicians that play the double bass as a guitar are fantastic. But I prefer, now as beforehand, to play in time: rhythm with a good sound, that will never be replaced by something else.
It is like the heartbeat.
Ray Brown

The expression “emancipation of the bass” has somehow a negative connotation, it comes to thinking that it was in chains beforehand… I have never felt limited in what I have tried to play. I have never had the impression of being a bassist in the rhythmic section with the task of accompanying a soloist and that my role was only that of being “functional”… The music in which an electric bass is used, is totally different from that performed by double bass: they are incomparable, as apples and oranges. I don’t believe that the electric bass can contribute to the evolution of the double bass.
Ron Carter

The bass has become more and more independent. In the old jazz there was a strong relationship between the instrument and the solo, but for me a solo doesn’t have to be limited to the instrument. What I like of today’s double bass is that all possible technical difficulties are left behind.
Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen

(About the fact that he originally played the electric bass and later abandoned it): Actually I just bought one back after fifteen years! I’m playing with it on my own and I don’t rule out playing it in public again, sooner or later. I had left him because maybe I hadn’t understood him. In my opinion, it is a very delicate instrument, it must be managed with intelligence. It is not a substitute for the double bass. Its matrix is (and must remain) simple, linear, granite. If it gets too cultured, I don’t care anymore. It must be in contact with the earth. I think of the sound of people like McCartney, Sting, Swallow, Pastorius.
Stefano Senni

I will die without understanding women and double basses’ intonation.
Arturo Toscanini

About rhythm section

It is not time that founds the rhythm. It is the rhythm that founds time.
Carlo  Sini

When I listen to my group I follow more the drums and the bass. It is what gives the boost.
Janis Joplin

Very few people choose to play the bass. There are people in the audience who like to listen to the bass, because they like those low frequencies, and the way they make their bodies feel. But the role of the bass player in the band is not usually the most exciting role, because he has to play repeated figures. We have a viola parallel here: electric bassists are often failed guitar players, demoted to this duty after a band meeting in a garage when they were thirteen.
Drummers often exhibit an attitude which advertises: “I play the drums because I am an animal, watch me beat these! Girls, are you paying attention now? I’m beating very hard!”.
Frank Zappa

Double bass players are usually big and affable, drummers low and nervous while pianists are pundits. The drummers are the real directors of the jazz band. They control the dynamics, the tempo and the sense of a song.
Winton Marsalis

The worth of an orchestra is the worth of its bass player.
Duke Ellington

The rhythmic error between bass and drums never resolves and continues to go on undeterred with the approval of the soloist who, in most cases, is even further away than the rhythm. The bass and the battery are two trains that leave together from Roma Termini to Florence but one of the two leaves three seconds after the other. The two trains will travel at exactly the same speed but slightly out of phase and will arrive at the Firenze Santa Maria Novella station on time, but one of the two will open its doors three seconds later.
Paolo Fresu

About music

You have to love to be able to play.
Louis Armstrong

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
Wystan Hugh Auden

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley

We don’t make the music, it’s the music that makes us.
David Byrne

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes… ah, that is where the art resides!
Artur Schnabel

If we could hear all the existing sounds, we would get crazy.
Charlie Parker

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.
Charlie Parker

First you master your instrument, then you master your music… then forget all of that and just play!
Charlie Parker

What you need to do is get to know the tool. And to control it… Because if you control it then you can get to do what you want.
Charlie Parker

The legendary cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he continued to practice at age 90.
“Because I think I’m making progress,” he replied.

Notes are like people. You have to get up and greet them one by one.
Wayne Shorter

A life without music is like a body without a soul.
Marco Tullio Cicerone

Funk and Soul are actually Jazz.
James Brown

My music is a kind of blues.
Jimi Hendrix

We are in a soloists’ world, but the main point is to learn the time, the rhythm.
Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix had a mind that was decidedly ahead of the technology of the time, the exact opposite of what we see today.
Riccardo Bertoncelli

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
Plato

If the music changes, the most important institutions will also change.
Plato

The birth of rock’n’roll was a real enlightenment.
Jim Morrison

Music cannot be understood without understanding society. Society cannot be understood without its music.
Franco Fabbri

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom or philosophy.
Ludwig Van Beethoven

I liked disco music since the beginning. Somebody moaned of its constant and identical rhythm… It is exactly what has already been said as regards Little Richards and Fats Domino.
John Lennon

Over all, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe. . . That’s what I would like to do. I think that’s one of the greatest things you can do in life and we all try to do it in some way. The musician’s is through his music.
John Coltrane

The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.
Arthur Schopenhauer

In the lowest sounds of harmony, in the fundamental bass, I recognize the lowest degrees of objectivising will, the inorganic nature, the mass of the planet.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The experience tells me that a work is known intimately only when it is sung mentally to ourselves almost recreating it in our own mind.
Aaron Copland

The youths always ask me where my style comes from, as it developed and all the rest; what Can I say? If you discover a song which has something to do with you, you don’t have to add anything else. Simply it gives you emotion, and when you sing it other people will feel something.
Billie Holiday

We all have to be different. You can’t copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you’re working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it’s got to be that way in music or it isn’t music.
Billie Holiday

It’s crazy to think that to play or sing one needs drugs. Because drugs can punish you in a such manner that you will never be able to sing and play music.
Billie Holiday

You yell out against the bad music, but you don’t despise it! The more bad music is performed or sung, the more is dense with tears, with human tears. It is in a marginal position in the history of arts, but it is one of the first in the history of the human consortium emotions. The respect for stupid music is not a form of charity itself, but the awareness of its social role. People have always the same messengers and heralds of bad news both in the periods of calamity and of radiant happiness: the bad musicians… A poor melodies’ score, with the pages crumpled by consumption, it should move us to tears like a city or a tomb. What does it matter if the civil buildings are without style, or if the tomb stones disappear under stupid inscription?
Marcel Proust

I don’t see big differences in the languages of sound and music. Sometimes the song, which is trivially presented as a minor thing, is actually much more beautiful and successful than many pretentious works of great music. Proust understood this perfectly when he said about popular music: it is grace and thought for millions of people.
Sylvano Bussotti

The music never drag meaning itself.
Arnold Schönberg

For I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc… Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention – in short, an aspect unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being.
Igor Stravinskij

Music is organized sound.
Edgard Varese

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is THE BEST…
Frank Zappa

“Conducting” is when you draw ‘designs’ in the nowhere – with a stick, or with your hands – which are interpreted as ‘instructional messages’ by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.
Frank Zappa

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it has to be God. Without Bach, God would be a third-rate character.
Emil Cioran

I respect the musicians for the only fact of being themselves, it doesn’t matter how different is their technique and style. They are special creatures, to be treated as artistic birds, and even as very, very necessary people, while the rest of the world chats, howls and barks. Commercial or not, all the musicians aim at creating joy: you respect them!
Karlheinz Stockhausen

(After a couple of minutes of fruitless effort to tune the guitar, looking up at the audience): It took me nearly twenty-five years to discover that I wasn’t very good at this particular aspect of the craft, but by now I was too rich to quit.
Chet Atkins

Music is my lady. I have very happy relationships, in many ways, with my woman. There are phases in which she herself offers me sounds, and others in which she awaits my echo.
Duke Ellington

Painting transforms space into time, music transforms time into space.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal

The character of non-real reality concerns the primary element of music: the sound is real in that it disappears the instant it arises.
Vladimir Jankélévitch

A note don’t care who plays it – whether you’re black, white, green, brown or opaque.
Clark Terry

Music is the true and infinite originality of time.
Francesco Flora

About art

A change in the field of the art shouldn’t occur, as in the fashion, only for the novelty. New music or new painting or new poetry have to mirror a new way of thinking in the world. The development of a new musical style will arrive thanks to the mind and the feeling of true artist, not of opportunists.
Jay Jay Johnson

Octavio Paz said one day: “It is enough that a man closes his eyes to have the power of blowing up the world in his thought “. I add, paraphrasing: “It is enough that the white eyelid of the screen could reflect the light that is one’s own to blown up over the universe”.
Luis Bunuel

The cultured musician will be able to study a Raphael’s Madonna with the same usefulness that the painter will study a symphony of Mozart … The aesthetics of an art is the same of any other, only the material is different.
Robert Schumann

The simplicity is the complexity itself, you must feed of its essence to understand its value.
Constantin Brancusi

Don’t look for obscure formulas or mystery in my work. It is pure joy that I offer you. Look at my sculptures until you see them. Those closest to God have seen them.
Constantin Brancusi

There hasn’t been any art yet. Art is just beginning.
Constantin Brancusi

I am neither surrealist, neither baroque, nor cubistic and none of any other of this kind of things. I come with my latest from something that is much more ancient.
Constantin Brancusi

We have to regard art as the greater enhancement, the more perfect development, of all this; for essentially it achieves just the same thing as is achieved by the visible world itself, only with greater concentration, perfection, intention, and intelligence; and therefore, in the full sense of the word, it may be called the flower of life. If the whole world a representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the elucidation of this visibility, the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey them and comprehend them better. It is the play within the play, the stage upon the stage.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Art is the cry of distress uttered by those who experience at firsthand the fate of mankind. Who are not reconciled to it, but come to grips with it. Who do not apathetically wait upon the motor called ‘hidden forces’, but hurl themselves in among the moving wheels, to understand how it all works. Who do not turn their eyes away, to shield themselves from emotions, but open them wide, so as to tackle what must be tackled. Who do, however, often close their eyes, in order to perceive things incommunicable by the senses, to envision within themselves the process that only seems to be the world outside. The world revolves within—inside them: what bursts out is merely the echo—the work of art!
Arnold Schönberg

The true art, as the Zen teacher says to an archer, it has not a purpose nor an intention. The more you persist to learn how to dart the arrow to hit the mark, the less you will succeed and the further will be the target. Your obstacle is your own will, too extended toward the end.
Eugen Herringel

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
Albert Einstein

I am convinced that the only necessary title to practice any art is the desire to do it. I think that talent is an idea far too considered.
Peter Gabriel

Masters, philosophy & knowledge

You can’t learn anything except what you love.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Despite the due devotion to many institutions and teachers, it’s necessary to take the essence from everything, as the bee takes the essence from many flowers.
Sanchia

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge. The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding. The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm, nor the voice that echoes it. And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither. For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man. And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.
Gibran Kahlil Gibran

I have come to believe that in school as in psychotherapy the only knowledge that can influence an individual’s behavior is that which he discovers for himself and appropriates.
Carl R. Roger

The lessons of the disappointment, of the humiliation and of the error strike more deeply than those of thousand teachers.
Johann Heinrich Füssli

The teacher is as a needle, the disciple is as thread. You must practice constantly.
Miyamoto Musashi

We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.
Thomas Stearns Eliot

When the student is ready the teacher will appear
Ancient Zen proverb

Since each individual is ultimately responsible to himself, the formation of that self requires the utmost care and attention.
Miles Teg (Frank Herbert)

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
Bene Gesserit musical cadence (Frank Herbert)

The power of thought
change fate.
Man sows a thought
and collects an action;
he sows an action
and picks up a habit;
he sows a habit
and collects a character;
sow a character
and picks up a destiny.
Man builds his future
with one’s thinking and acting.
He can change it
because he is the real owner of it.
Swami Sivananda

Master Yagyu Munenori once remarked: “I do not know the way to defeat others, but the way to defeat myself.” Throughout your life advance daily, becoming more skillful than yesterday, more skillful than today. This is never ending.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo

If one is but secure at the foundation, he will not be pained by departure from minor details or affairs that are contrary to expectation. But in the end, the details of a matter are important. The right and wrong of one’s way of doing things are found in trivial matters.
Yamamoto Tsunetomo

When you are in the face of a tree, if you only look one of his red leaves you won’t see all the other… Will be as if the other don’t exist.
Takuan Soho

Two forces, which have an equal degree of certainty, of unity and at the same time are equally original and universal, that is, the forces of repulsion and attraction.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
William Blake

When the things become too heavy, you could call me helium.
Jimi Hendrix

Neither the memory of an event past nor its anticipation can be confused with the event.
The past and the future only exist as projections of the eternal present.
VanLag

Consider the fulfillment of all things and alone
then you will detach from it.
Corano

If you want to know your past, to know what caused you, then observe yourself in the present, which is the effect of the past. If you want to know your future, to know what it will bring you, then observe yourself in the present, which is the cause of the future.
Siddharta

Like it or not, we are the cause of ourselves.
Giordano Bruno

Our knowledge of time is oriented exactly with respect to the number of years we have lived. The younger you are, the longer a year, but also an hour or a day. If I am five years old, one year corresponds to one fifth of my life; if I’m fifty, it’s only one fiftieth. This only changes when you get old and start counting from death and no longer from birth. Then the years become imperceptibly longer again.
Hannah Arendt

Knowing is not enough, we must apply, we must do.
Thought without action is useless.
Bruce Lee

Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.
Bruce Lee

It is not enough to want to arrive, you have to decide to arrive.  Esoteric master

It is not necessary to hope in order to act, nor to succeed in order to persevere.
William of Orange

Love calls love. It is not so important to be loved as to love. With strength and with our whole being.
Constantin Brancusi

About criticism and music journalism

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
Gustave Flaubert

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
Gustave Flaubert

Rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, in order to provide articles for people who can’t read.
Frank Zappa

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Martin Mull

The show must go on

Everything in my life is music, because everything in the life is show. Now that I am speaking with you I am doing a show for you. When someone are listening my record, I am doing a show for him, at his home.
Frank Zappa

Everything the man does is a public, social act, it is communication.
Vittorio Gelmetti

About computer

The question of whether machines can think… is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
Edsgar W. Dijkstra

An expert is a person who avoids the small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy.
Arthur Bloch