3 Quotes by Ben Ratliff

I remember once I asked Wayne for the time," Miller told Mercer. "He started talking to me about the cosmos and how time is relative." Miller and [Wayne] Shorter were waiting somewhere -- an airport, a train station, a hotel. The band's keyboardist, Joe Zawinul, who took charge of such matters as what the road crew was supposed to do and when, set Miller straight. "You don't ask Wayne shit like that," he snapped. "It's 7:06 p.m." [p.1]

Speed in music is like a sweater on a dog: mostly for show.

We think of pieces of music from a distance as blocks of time, but can we hold more than a second or two in our minds? And are we – with all music, to some extent – waiting around for some pinpointed extraordinariness to happen? Not.