Jan Hammer Quotations

Everything from now on will be done online - physical music media like the CD are dead in the water.

Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.

I spent well over a year on the road with Sarah Vaughn. That was amazing.

Emotions are the fuel to really move you along - that's the only way you can create music. If you don't feel any emotions, it's not going to happen.

My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer.

I've been doing a lot of music for films and television for quite a few years.

Still for fun, I play the drums, but I don't do much recording with them.

The problem that I have is with the music business. For some reason it seems almost impossible to get anything, any music, released which includes improvisation or soloing.

You never know what you find once you really get going.

The passion and spontaneity in music is all gone.

It was very hard to get any records, so the only source for us to really hear what was happening was listening to the Voice of America. We would be taping all the broadcast and then sharing the tapes and talking about it.

Maybe there'll be new bits of music that will start showing up. You know? Like what happened in the 60s. Everything just broke wide open. Music started getting connected between Jazz and Rock and Pop. Everything was wide open, there was much more freedom. Hopefully something like that will happen again.

CDs, as a physical product, are almost finished. Basically it's going to be "Wide World of Online.

CDs, as a physical product, are almost finished. Basically it's going to be ""Wide World of Online.

I'm so far removed from live playing any more.

The writing is not as important as how the people who are playing, play together, how they clicked and where we took it with improvisation.

There was this curtain, the Iron Curtain, and it was keeping out interesting, cutting-edge music. But other than that, it was pretty normal.

It's not really that I didn't want to perform at all. What I didn't want to do was try to put together a band, rehearse, on my own. You know what I mean?

The band couldn't have happened anywhere else in the world but New York. That was the catalyst.

If you think about it, the word "composing" or to compose, means to put together. So, you have to know what to put together and what to leave out.