“MY PIANO IS MY BEST FRIEND “ ~Rick Wright
Blake: Do you listen to a lot of other music? Are you inspired by other keyboard players?
Rick Wright: I don’t listen to as much music as I used to, because I’m so busy with my own music.
I don’t think of other players as competition.
I have a style of the Hammond which – good or bad – is my own.
I’m not technically a great pianist.
I was saying to someone the other day that I wish I could play honky-tonk piano.
I listen to Dr. John and appreciate what he does, but then, can he play the Hammond like I can?
I look at myself as more of a writer than an actual performer.
I can’t play the piano fast – I’m no Oscar Peterson – and I can’t read music.
Sometimes, I wish I could sit down and play a wonderful piano concerto.
Wright: I went to a private school, a dreadful private school, to do theory and composition. That was while I was going to architecture school as well, and after that, I went to the London College of Music. Someone used to stand there and he obviously didn’t beat my hands if I went wrong, but it was a bit of a joke. I used to learn the pieces off by heart, and then play them and pretend I was sight-reading. And, of course, he caught me out. He said, ‘Right, stop and go back four bars,’ and I didn’t know where I was.
~~ Bruno MacDonald, Pink Floyd through the eyes of… the band, its fans, friends, and foes
Because I studied composition and arranging, I had a thing about how chords should progress from one to the other. I also hated things being out of tune… None of us were technically proficient. I’ve always wished I had the technique to become a concert pianist but I haven’t. We were all self-taught. I taught myself to play when I was four years old. I didn’t have a teacher, so my technique is completely wrong. I can’t play a scale in the way that you’re meant to play it. That limits my technique and ability to play fast. But I didn’t have a problem with that because one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard a musician say was from Miles Davis. He said, “It’s not the notes that matter, it’s the spaces in between.” I’ve always felt that, and that’s how I play. Blues guitarists understand that, too, that a single note can mean more than a thousand.
~~Mark Paytress, My Piano is Therapy for Me – Mojo
As a child, he played trumpet, trombone and then guitar, as well as piano. “When I left school, my careers master said: ‘What do you want to do?’ I said: ‘I have no idea, but I want to play music,’ and he said: ‘Well, you’re pretty good at drawing, go to architecture school.’ So I went, but I wasn’t interested in architecture at all. I was into forming shapes, but I wanted to be a musician.
“So when I was at polytechnic, I went off and had private lessons in composition at the Eric Gilder School of Music, then I went to the London School of Music; all this while I was studying architecture.
“The tutor came up to me and said: ‘You’re not into architecture, are you?’ I said: ‘No.’ He said: ‘It’s a waste of time you coming; go off and be a musician.’ But thank God I went there, because that’s where I met Roger and Nick.”
Pratt says: “His playing was very structural, maybe because they were architecture students. When he was on my bedroom wall in that 1970s age of jazz-fusion and pointless virtuosity, his subtle injection of a few chords made you see the relevance of jazz to one’s own musical world. He was responsible for me and millions of people investigating Miles Davis.”
More than that, he smuggled Davis into the group. “There was a Making of Dark Side of the Moon documentary,” Pratt goes on, “and he came up with one little gem on there, that the chords for Breathe came from Kind of Blue. Then you listened again and thought, ‘It’s true’.”
Wright said at the time: “I don’t want to be the fastest pianist on the planet, I don’t want to be Dizzy Gillespie, who could play a zillion notes a bar, I’d like to be Miles, who can play one note a bar.”
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