Brass Band Quotes

At This Moment Of Time

Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the colored lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes
Are haunted by water

Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That "no man is happy," but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow's friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight ~ Delmore Schwartz

Parents can fail to cheer your successes as wildly as you expected, pointing out that you are sharing your Nobel Prize with a couple of other people, or that your Oscar was for supporting actress, not really for a starring role. More subtly, they can cheer your successes too wildly, forcing you into the awkward realization that your achievement of merely graduating or getting the promotion did not warrant the fireworks and brass band. ~ Frank Pittman

Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed. ~ Tom Piazza

she wore so many brooches and necklaces and earrings that she jingled and jangled just like a brass band. ~ P.L. Travers

Kingsley could 'do' the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter (this was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations). To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem (a tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial meeting, where I was hugely honored to be among the speakers). The pièce de résistance, an attempt by British soldiers to start up a frozen two-ton truck on a windy morning 'somewhere in Germany,' was for special occasions only. One held one's breath as Kingsley emitted the first screech of the busted starting-key. His only slightly lesser vocal achievement - of a motor-bike yelling in mechanical agony - once caused a man who had just parked his own machine in the street to turn back anxiously and take a look. The old boy's imitation of an angry dog barking the words 'fuck off' was note-perfect. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Father was an atheist; he had even joined the Skeleton Army - a club of men who went about in masks or black faces, with ribald placards and a brass band, to make war upon the Salvation Army. ~ A.E. Coppard

If bullshit were music, you'd be a big brass band, ~ A Meredith Walters

In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind. ~ Charles Ives

We Irish don't really need thousands of people surging behind a big brass band to have a parade. One guitar player and a few people whistling will do the job. ~ Gene Tierney

I wore white gloves. I lived with my mother & father. I was not a child. I was 37 years old. My bottom lip was swollen. I wore white gloves though I was not a servent. I did not play in a brass band. I was not a waiter. I was not a magician. I was the attendant of a museum. ~ Edward Carey

I grew up on a council estate in Luton, and as a child, I was very much into the brass-band tradition. I was basically a Salvation Army boy. My English granddad bought me a cornet when I was five years old. ~ Colin Salmon

That you were once unkind befriends me now, And for that sorrow, which I then did feel, Needs must I under my transgression bow, Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel ... ~ William Shakespeare

Ben was more improvisational, and relied less on methodology, and basically is a guitarist who switched to bass, whereas Jeff has a more traditional approach to playing bass in a band, and has a great sense of what his band sounds like, and we lock up nicely. ~ Matt Cameron

I tend to be a jam-band fan, and I love the Rolling Stones. ~ Jessy Schram

I think that every band is different, and in fact that's one of the biggest problems with the old-school music industry is that ... one band would be successful according to a certain approach, and then every other band in the label gets sent down the same tube. ~ Emily Haines

This band makes sure that we have whole sections of stuff that are free form so that they don't know what we are doing next, that is the fun part of playing. You are playing something that you haven't ever played before. ~ John Entwistle

We make our customs lightly; once made, like our sins, they grip us in bands of steel; we become the creatures of our creation. ~ Charles W. Chesnutt

The Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. ~ George Eliot

Edible names are what drives me as a musician. My next band will be called the Hot Dogs. ~ Chad Smith

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy. ~ Virginia Woolf

It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey's trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perception. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend's velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item – to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man's work in the world to do with red velvet bands? He would n't for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he had none the less not only caught himself in the act – frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected – of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a starting point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights. ~ Henry James

I can tell you there is no finer stadium to play in. The traditions that they place in that stadium like when they announce that it's Saturday night in Death Valley, when the band plays, when that crowd stands and cheers for the Tigers, there is no place like it in America. ~ Les Miles

New life plan: form a band called Cosmic Killjoy. ~ Katie Henry

As I said to Ringo, I was in a successful Rock N Roll band. He was in a band that changed the world. That's the difference. ~ Greg Lake

What is now the foliage moving?
Air is still, and hush'd the breeze,
Sultriness, this fullness loving,
Through the thicket, from the trees.
Now the eye at once gleams brightly,
See! the infant band with mirth
Moves and dances nimbly, lightly,
As the morning gave it birth,
Flutt'ring two and two o'er earth. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I always resented Tom [Hardy] for turning up on Band Of Brothers and getting the girl - in fact, the only girl in a cast of hundreds of smelly men! I, on the other hand, spent eight months with my face squashed up against someone else's backside in one sodden trench after another. And it looks as if Tom might have got the girl again [in Colditz], damn his eyes. ~ Damian Lewis

She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring
to strike
when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High."
Harry Crews- A Feast of Snakes ~ Harry Crews

I love David Bowie and Cher and Diana Ross. I wanted to follow in their footsteps. So I set out to do that in a rock-'n'-roll band in Atlanta, Georgia. That led me to nightclubs and to the sort of Andy Warhol experience of creating a personality. ~ RuPaul

Logan began to sing, a lilting tune I didn't recognize. At first I wondered if we'd seen the band in concert together or had listened to it on one of our first dates.
Then he reached the chorus, and the words were us.
All my insecurities, all his excesses, all the ways we fought and pushed and pulled. And how it all didn't matter. Those things that tore us apart were no match for forever.
...
I'd been so wrong about us. If he'd lived, we would've been happy. Not every day, but over the span of time that made up forever.
But he hadn't lived.
...
We had lost forever. ~ Jeri Smith-Ready

What I see for the band by the end of this year is the Complex live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. I want my guys to be comfortable. I'm certainly not in this for the money, but I'd really like to see my guys make some money off of this stuff. ~ Jimmy Chamberlin

You don't need to be born with a silver spoon to reach for the brass ring ~ Sandra Lee

If you're the singer in the band, you always get more attention than anyone else. ~ Mick Jagger

I used to tour with this band. I was a drummer. I would tour a bunch for about 10 months out of the year and act for about two months. I would make what I needed from acting and would stretch it out. ~ Michael Pena

I had friends in this band called Mars and they used to play a lot. ~ Arto Lindsay

The Queens Of The Stone Age have teamed up with multimedia wizard brain Liam Lynch to make the video for 'Burn The Witch' , a home-made affair that's just in time for Halloween. For the band, playing both the roles of cast and crew paid ginormous dividends, in the form of a video that cuts the heads off all contemporaries . ~ Joshua Homme

There will come a time - in the not-so-distant future - when you will no longer need to make a special trip to see me or anyone else to get "attuned" to this new band of frequencies. Soon you'll be sitting in a theater, on an airplane, or on a bus, and you'll simply pick up this new resonance from the person sitting next to you. ~ Eric Pearl

Our original name was Wild Country, but when we first went to The Bowery, they had the name of all 50 states around the edge of the club, so we went to the sign that said 'Alabama' and stuck our band name underneath it. ~ Randy Owen

I've had nightmares about having to kick people out of my band because they've said that they don't like the Beatles. I'd wake up and turn to them and say, "You like the Beatles, right?" ~ Danger Mouse

The Ruts were a great punk rock band from England whose songs were as excellent as their time together was short. ~ Henry Rollins

If what you want to do is make artwork for bands, you have to love doing it because there is almost no money in it. In order to start doing it, you just have to put yourself out there, work for bands you love and for as little as possible to start, if not free, that's what I did for years. ~ John Dyer Baizley

Caitlin Cary and I were always talking about X when we talked about whiskeytown, before it became an actual band. We like the concept of there being no real front person in X, yet this kind of switch up of vocals and really their sheer power, and their ability to sort of bastardise punk rock and midwetsren rock and even country into their own sound. ~ Ryan Adams

The thing about Matt Cameron is he has made us 1000 times a better band than we've ever been. He's such a freight train on drums and such a cool individual as a man that it makes us better as a band, and we are now complete with him. ~ Mike McCready

She skinned her hair back into a ponytail, a style she knew was probably too young for her, but she planned to drive with her windows open and she could ditch the elastic band once she got to the lake. ~ Joanne Fluke

I don't know if I miss it per se, but I do miss the fact that there just doesn't seem to be any rock 'n' roll out there anyplace. Everything does seem kind of tame. It's even hard in Manhattan to go out and find a good band to go see. ~ Joan Jett

The teenage lead singer counted off, and the band launched into a hot version of "Ooh, My Head," the old Ritchie Valens song - and not really so old in the summer of '61, although Valens had been dead for almost two years. ~ Stephen King

There are five of us. We've all played in various bands together, in different combinations. I know that Todd [Cook] and Tony [Bailey] are my favorite rhythm section - they're just like a unit. I guess we've all just played together in various capacities, so when the band was coming together, it was sort of like we just chose members because they had similar sensibilities and also because they're just cool. We all got along real well. ~ David Pajo

I am made to sow the thistle for wheat; the nettle for a nourishing dainty
I have planted a false oath in the earth, it has brought forth a poison tree
I have chosen the serpent for a councellor & the dog for a schoolmaster to my children
I have blotted out from light & living the dove & the nightingale
And I have caused the earthworm to beg from door to door
I have taught the thief a secret path into the house of the just
I have taught pale artifice to spread his nets upon the morning
My heavens are brass my earth is iron my moon a clod of clay
My sun a pestilence burning at noon & a vapor of death in night

What is the price of Experience do men buy it for a song
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath his house his wife his children
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy
And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summers sun
And in the vintage & to sing on the waggon loaded with corn
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer
To listen to the hungry ravens cry in wintry season
When the red blood is filled with wine & with the marrow of lambs
It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements
To hear a dog howl at the wintry door, the o ~ William Blake

One phrase stuck in Fainy's mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege. ~ John Dos Passos

In 2007, I studied with Peter Erskine because I was doing a Buddy Rich tribute concert, and I wanted to take my big-band drumming up a level. I went over to Peter's house with my sticks, feeling like a 13-year-old again. ~ Neil Peart

Plan B is really a little garage band of three people, and our mandate has been to help get difficult material, that might not otherwise get made, to the screen and to work with directors we respect. ~ Brad Pitt