Jimmy Winokur
Ideas & Quotations

Try to imagine the very first musician. He was not playing for an audience,
or a market, or working on his next recording, or touring with his show, or working on his image.  He was playing out of his need, out of his need for the music.

Every year the number of musicians who remember why they play music in the first place grows smaller…”  It is the individual voice, present to itself, that needs to be heard. 
We need to hear the process of a musician working on himself.

We don't need to hear who is more clever with synthesizers.  
Our cleverness has created the world we live in, which in many 
ways we're sorry about.

We hear jazz musicians dabbling in world music and
American Indian music, Minimalists filling as many sheets of paper
as they can before they run out of "idea," industry reps
dressed as players, players dressed as movie stars, indeed
becoming movie stars-----, black musicians without soul and
countless "studio" musicians reading newspapers in the
control rooms (and getting paid handsomely for it, you might say
being paid for their patience). 

We hear all this, but where is that voice, that individual primal need? 
Where is Miles?  Where is the music?

Keith Jarrett, Categories Aplenty, But Where's The Music?,
New York Times (1992).  
This excerpt is from what became a controversial rant
by pianist Jarrett, written upon the death of Miles Davis in 1992 -
a moment some considered a point of dark transition
in the development of modern jazz.   (1992).

The cry is for sense pleasures:  more sex, money, alcohol.  ...Desire for "my God" is supplanted by
the desire for "my man."  Mankind's vision decays, entangled by the search for temporary relief
from its subjugation to false gods. 

But the cry is still there, even if man no longer knows for what.  It is the yearning for unity, for oneness as experienced in the mother's womb, attuned to the rhythm of her heartbeat.  The muffled song can still be heard from the God within "seeking to behold himself" and man's yearning to behold himself," and man's yearning to be one with him. 

Later the blues, drained of all meaning, decays into a twelve bar crossword puzzle to be "re-harmonized" in theory class.  Finally, jazz visionaries revive it as an Indian Tala and ascend on its numeric highway.

Kenny Werner, Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within

I love this record for the same reason a lot of critics and even his fans don't like it: 
You have to spend time with it.  Think about it:  If {the Miles Davis classic] Kind of Blue 
had come out today, nobody would have given a shit.  I hear Nicholas taking his time, developing his ideas and 
not being afraid.  There's missed notes on some of these tracks.  I love hearing that type of stuff.  
You don't hear that on any of his earlier records.  Why?  

Because when you start making records and your name gets out there, the pressure to play as perfectly as possible 
can get  in the way....   This record represents him taking his time....  I prefer it now because he's not trying to prove anything. 
It's what I call a state of being lived in, where you come into yourself -- he's focusing on developing his ideas 
in a more organic, non-forced way....

Jeremy Pelt, on fellow-trumpeter Nicholas Payton's  The Crimson Touch;
commenting in "Opening Chorus:  Before and After",  Jazz Times, October 2008.

All music is folk music. 
I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.

Louis Armstrong

Music expresses that which cannot be said 
and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Victor Hugo 

I've always been a musician -- I've spent 50 years practicing music....  Only in the last five years have I tried to develop writing
 discipline....  At first I fully anticipated being able to  say what I mean, to so fill the arteries with word blood as to sense 
the pulse of the heart.  Or something.  Perfect clarity does occur in music  -- one learns to compose or perform 
all of what the moment carries, even to spill some foam, so to speak.  But I never feel that words completely say 
what aches to be said....

Language is metaphor and simile, and the operative word is like, spoken or implied.  Words approach experience roundabout, 
pecking and jabbing at it from every side until eventually a blow draws blood, then a vital cut, then experience flows red.  
It is like that, and like that, till we zero in on meaning impossible to articulate directly.  ...Words that are beautifully right 
can bring you so close to the edge that all you have to do is make a little jump -- plink! -- like a finch off a wire.

Music is entirely specific: what you hear is what you get.  Language is rich and various and inexact.  You have to keep saying 
what is, a thousand ways, until someone jumps.

W. A. Mathieu, The Musical Life: Reflections on What it is and How to Live It

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, 
I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

William Faulkner