Top 15 Clare Fischer Quotes

Wow Factors: Absolute integrity is a must, but it's also the emotional content that will get the listener.
A Memorable Performance: Taking my children to see Duke Ellington perform live in L.A. with his big band around 1970. His sax section is irreplaceable.
Advice for Achieving "Wow": There is only one level and that is professional. You must do whatever is required to achieve that in every performance.
Audition Tips: Anybody can show off with flashy displays, but when a performance exudes maturity, that can only come as a result of deep, heartfelt contemplation. That person will stand out.
Sensing Something Extraordinary: When you are reduced to tears by the sheer beauty of what you are hearing.
Who Would You Like to Hear? To be able to hear J.S. Bach take a melody and improvise what amounts to a spontaneous composition is the most amazing thing I can think of.
Have Wow Factors Changed? Audiences tend to be fickle. I've been lucky enough in that many musicians attend my concerts, so that I can just be myself.

Scotty and I became good friends. We had an immediate musical rapport that was sensational. We did a lot of listening and talking. Besides technique, he had governing, control. I think he was the first bass player who was fleet-footed in the musical sense. [...] What a trauma! It struck me right down—that someone I was developing such a relationship with would suddenly not be there.

When I had a big band in the late 1960s, though, Warne and I were working quite a lot together. Warne would be turning time around, and dealing with cross-the-bar structures, and starting phrases in odd places—his intuition was really far out! He was one of the greatest players ever.

Tristano was too contrived for me; he sounded terribly planned. Lee is very intuitive. One of my proudest achievements was when I finally got to play the saxophone well enough that I could improvise on it. I aimed to have a tone like Lee Konitz—but I don't necessarily think I got there!

How did I get to Lee Konitz, when everybody else was doing Charlie Parker? The sound, for one thing, the notes that he played—man, it just knocked me off my feet! When Lee was first playing, God he was inventive! I worked out so many solos of his off the records, from when he began recording with Tristano and Warne Marsh in 1949. I listened to Charlie Parker but I was not a fan—he was repeating himself too much.

Prince either uses or doesn't use what I have. When he gets it, I understand he listens to the strings separately, he'll listen to the brass separately and the woodwinds separately and then he'll put it all together and listen to it. So when we got to his movie, Cherry Moon, most of the music that was what you might refer to as the 'underscore' was the backgrounds that I had written for certain songs of his, that he took the voices and his part out. Now I would have preferred to write the individual sections, but on the other hand, it worked out just fine.

I'm a writer who plays the piano. As I write, I find new things I like. I make them into what I call principles, and they become part of my playing vocabulary. That's the secret of what you get from composing. You get to discover things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. Much like a speech pattern, your improvisation patterns can get stale if you don't keep building your vocabulary. Each time you re voice something, you change the sound. When you do this enough, you get used to those sounds, and they start to come out as you play. You end up using voicings that aren't common, which gives you an auditory identity.

You get tired of dealing with how other people think of what you're doing. It finally gets to the point where you realize that if you're going to do it the way you want, you have to do it yourself. That might mean putting up the money to do it yourself.

I had gone to hear the winner of that year's drum and bugle corps competition. That band played a chord that made every hair on my body stand up. I've been in front of great symphony orchestras, and the greatest bands, but I've never had my hair stand up quite like that. That's when I decided to write for the bugles.

I found, once I passed the age of forty, that I have a good sense of humor. It’s only through that I can keep stuff off and go through my life. If you sit and try to take on everything that is going on out there, you’re going to end up with problems. That’s where I feel music. And music becomes the way in which I express feelings. And, because it allows me to have contact with my emotions, it’s a constant catharsis, not just playing and writing. By doing that, you alleviate something inside of you. And who knows where that comes from?

In 1964, my first steady job in the studios in this city was with the NBC Orchestra playing for the Andy Williams Show. So who comes on that show but Antonio Carlos Jobim. And he comes over to the orchestra, doesn’t say a word to me. He sits down to the piano and starts playing a bossa I had written that the Hi-Lo’s recorded. I mean, he’s heard of me?''

You have to recognize those writers who are artists in the same sense as the musicians. “Catching colds and missing trains.” Man, I wish I could say something that clever. Johnny Mercer was a wonderful lyric writer. You have to appreciate those. And then you get into the other thing where the lyricist says, “It’s not the composer, it’s what the lyricist did that’s important.” Come on. When I find a song that is equal parts of both, that’s a damn good song, and that’ll be one of the songs I use all the time.

I had a concussion nine years ago, and that changed things. I had always been sensitive musically, but now, since the concussion, I find the emotion is there immediately. There is no build. I hear several chord changes — it could be three or four chord changes from a string orchestra — and, man, I’m just gushing tears. I don’t take it as a weakness. Sometimes it might get slightly embarrassing to observers. On the other hand, I’m not putting it on. I’m in no way trying to exaggerate feeling. My feelings are exactly the opposite. Sometimes I wish I wouldn’t be quite as sensitive because then I wouldn’t have to go through this thing when I write.

For my whole life I can’t remember not doing what I’m doing now, and I’m seventy. I was picking out four-part harmony at eight and nine years of age on the piano. Why? I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is it’s there and harmony is something that really stimulates the hell out of me. I just saw each thing as a logical exposure to something which I developed further.

I am one of the best kept secrets in jazz history. Many of my early records are hard to find and it is still difficult to release new ones.