Music

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.
Martin Luther (1483 - 1546)

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

Only sick music makes money today.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), Der Fall Wagner, Section 5

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'
Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990)

I have sprinkled quotes throughout my site and they are certainly not random. For instance, Martin Luther I admire as he stood up against one of the most powerful institutions the world has ever known with only the power of his mind and his ideas. Oscar Wilde wrote my favorite stage play - "The Importance of Being Earnest" and, like a lot of great thinkers with revolutionary ideas, he spent time in jail for making the powers-that-be uncomfortable. Bertrand Russell, Alexander Solzehnitsyn, Voltaire, Marquis de Sade, and Sir Walter Raleigh are among the many who the power structure tried to shut away from the world. Sorry to go off on a tangent but they have all affected my world view and my music.

I don't know that I could live among people without music. I have been performing music since cave men began bangin rocks together and grunting rhythmically. I started out taking piano lessons but then switched to the trumpet after hearing Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. However, my family went on vacation to Penang, Malaysia the week before my fourteenth birthday. While my father was playing golf and my mother was shopping somewhere, I walked through town and passed by a pirate record store that was blasting "Band of Gypsys" and I heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time. Until that point I loved rock music - particularly The Beatles, Iron Butterfly, and The Rolling Stones - but, after that, I could think of little else. My father bought me my first electric guitar a few days later.