Any good music must be an innovation.
Les Baxter
I love doing concert music.
I don't think the record company is aware of it. Because they just bury my albums and don't release them.
I aim my arrangements at what will fit and colorfully frame the song in the best way possible.
I write emotional music.
Under my contract with Capitol, I have complete freedom to do just about anything I want in my own way.
You know, they wanted to do a Broadway album and every show was kind of a bomb. There was no music at all.
Regardless of who originally made it popular, any hit song becomes a challenge to the ingenuity and imagination of other musicians and performers.
I don't try to make 15 musicians sound like two each.
I'm not an intellectual composer.
I've never believed in cheapening music by going according to what some people think is public taste.
In a sense, a hit belongs to the person who made it popular, but if a tune is good enough to attain tremendous success, then it certainly deserves more than one version, one treatment, one approach.
I did the Broadway album unfortunately in a year when there were no hits.
Well, that's the secret of commerciality, a simple style and you stick with it.
That was when the Spanish came in and conquered the Aztecs. I thought that was a clever thing.
I've been down there 6 times and there's nothing like Brazilian percussion.
I don't know what the problem with Capitol is. Some one's got to wake 'em up. Prod 'em a little bit.
I was working all the time I was in college. I was working so much that I could hardly do my college work.
When I want 30 musicians in the orchestra, I get 30.
