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" And I try to be as diplomatic as I can, but it always ends up being a psychodrama up there on stage. "
John Zorn
I Can
Always
Up
Related Quotes:
" It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge. "
John Zorn
Spontaneous
Matter
Edge
" Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y'know, that's tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea. "
John Zorn
Choice
Hands
You
" My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music. "
John Zorn
Improvisation
Music
Solo
" People sometimes have a very hard time accepting change. "
John Zorn
Hard
Time
Change
" You can't sit down and write 300 compositions in a three-month period and think that you're doing it all by yourself. Obviously, there's something going on here. And whether you want to call it channeling or being connected to a creative force or knowing your history and knowing where you belong, that's, you know, maybe a personal thing. "
John Zorn
History
Yourself
Creative
" Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance. "
John Zorn
Preparation
Performance
Good
" Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now. "
John Zorn
Now
City
Say
" I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing. "
John Zorn
Down
Work
Person
" I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together. "
John Zorn
My Life
Bach
Together
" Man, Dick Dale shreds. He's welcomed to anybody's bar mitzvah. "
John Zorn
He
Man
Bar Mitzvah
" I have not practiced saxophone since 1980. I mean, not one note. I do not pick it up in my house, and that's the end of it. "
John Zorn
End
Pick
House
" When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way. "
John Zorn
Trying
Sometimes
Place
" I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.' "
John Zorn
Support
Music
More
" I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way. "
John Zorn
Irony
Humor
Sense Of Humor
" It breaks even. We lose ten, twenty grand every year. But then the people who are working say, Look, I'll kick this back in, I don't need to take this profit share. It's very cooperative. "
John Zorn
Lose
Need
People
" One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don't sell. "
John Zorn
Started
Tired
Things
" I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading. "
John Zorn
Doing
Thinking
Name
" Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don't like. "
John Zorn
Good
Great
Musicians
" You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy. "
John Zorn
Crazy
World
You
" Eye was a great discovery. He is one of the great vocalists of all time. "
John Zorn
Great
Eye
He
" If someone is a straight jazzhead, or a straight metalhead, or straight classical, they have a very narrow range of what they allow into their lives. But the people who listen to what we put out into the world have to be open-minded. Because we're so pluralist. "
John Zorn
Listen
World
People
" I create work, and I devote myself to the creative process, and I try to, you know, stay pure in that process and be worthy of the messages that I receive. "
John Zorn
Work
Myself
Process
" As soon as you get a certain amount of attention, then everybody kinda wants to start taking pot shots at you. All your old friends that supported you don't support you any more. "
John Zorn
Old Friends
Support
Start
" One thing that I do ask myself when I'm in the creative process is, 'Does the world need this?' "
John Zorn
Myself
Process
Need
" I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages. "
John Zorn
Me
See
Myself
" I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I'm doing or get involved in what they're doing. "
John Zorn
Doing
Run
Someone
" Anything that gets in the way of my focus to create gets cut out of my life. It's not easy. Sometimes it's family. Sometimes it's friends. Sometimes it's the ability to have a relationship. "
John Zorn
Relationship
Family
Easy
" Each record in the 'Book of Angels' series is meant to be unique in terms of the compositions. "
John Zorn
Meant To Be
Angels
Book
" I have about two or three people, we don't have an office, we don't even have a dedicated phone line. We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work. "
John Zorn
Office
Own
Three
" I'm not striving for happiness, I'm trying to get some work done. And sometimes the best work is done under doubt. Constantly rethinking and re-evaluating what you're doing, working and working until it's finished. "
John Zorn
You
Best
Doing