For a while, I was working on transcribing rap lyrics and then converting them into rhythmic patterns on the piano. And so in my mind, when I was taking a solo, I would be saying the lyrics and trying to play actual notes to their rhythms. Now, the influence just comes in and out in my playing.

Jason Moran

The rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it - the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it.

Ali Smith

My head is full of shifting patterns and polyrhythmic stuff; but I want to use all acoustic instruments and create this kind of tapestry of interlocking lulling parts.

Andrew Bird

Rather than highlighting music's differences, Kids & Explosions' Josh Raskin mixes songs together based on their surprising common ground, making them blend rhythmically and melodically.

Anthony Fantano

I play more rhythmically than I do a lot of notes.

Bobby Keys

Music has to be written while people are still excited about a particular melodic or rhythmic sequence. The idea doesn't come out the same if we're not really excited about it.

Brandon Boyd

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

Brian Eno

I gravitate to rhythmic music, so I listen to jazz, world music, Indian music, Hawaiian music, all kinds.

Brian Stokes Mitchell

It's Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony I'm really looking forward to. Simon Rattle does it perfectly: he understands its primal rhythmic life force, and he and the wonderful Berliners make it a sheer riot of orchestral colour.

Charles Hazlewood

The process of filmmaking is very musical, you get into the rhythm and the rhythmics of how someone is, especially with Woody Allen who is very much into body language and body movement.

Charlotte Rampling

I think, until I was 16, classical music had just seemed like a little bit of a rhythmic wasteland for me. Coming from bluegrass, where one conducts oneself rhythmically, it seemed like such a different approach, and at that point the difference that I was noticing was a real turn off to me.

Chris Thile

Brazilian music has many of the ingredients that I strive for in my own music: Strong melodies and a disciplined but intense rhythmic concept, and interesting harmonies.

Chuck Mangione

I think music will be created algorhythmically, all the things that we do will be boiled down to a little computer program.

Cliff Martinez

There's something rhythmic about running, so it's not surprising that I love it. I'm a bass player, after all.

Curt Smith

I've been taking tabla lessons and they've helped expand my rhythmic horizons.

Danny Carey

I like creating these rhythmic patterns. These interlocking rhythmic things are really fun.

Danny Elfman

When you start out with goals - mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically - you never exhaust that. I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.

Dave Brubeck

I'll never forget getting my first Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chain records, and hearing that wonderful, beautiful darkness. And the rhythmic intensity, that's what attracted me more than anything else.

David Draiman

Don't get me wrong - we love our hip-hop, but in its own context. Rap has no place in our music. Is what we do rhythmic? Sure. Is it syncopated? Certainly. But our music has nothing to do with hip-hop.

David Draiman

I'm from the East Coast; I think about things dialectically sometimes - in other words, antagonistically. The rhythms that I think of are polyrhythmic, bouncy, loping. The way that I want to approach that is to get, like, a flat-footed Connecticut hard-core drummer to play these bouncy, loping polyrhythms.

David Longstreth

In any operation, what you have to do is to persuade the patient to grant access to the patient's energy. The purest form of that is when you're trying to help a woman through labor: when you're saying, 'Push, push!' and you're rhythmically with the woman.

David Milch