Focus Quotes

I got a little piano when I was 2, but you couldn't play anything on it because the black keys were out, so it was all tonal. It was just a few years later that I saw this little guitar in a shop window by my home, and on Christmas day I had it. It cost ten bucks, and since that time I've played day-in day-out, year-in year-out. My father said I should know more about the guitar, so he arranged it so that I got a scholarship from the state, and I had to do an exam for this guy. I did that for five years, and then I was getting questioned on the theoretical side so they said, "Out!" But I can read very well now. I also read tablature, the 15th and 16th Century notation of the music for the lute.
Jan Akkerman

I guess it was the Friendship Sextet. These guys were 21, 23 and I was 10. But this was just on the weekends because these guys kept asking my parents, "Hey, hey, hey, he should play with us." But my parents said, "No, this boy isn't going to go anywhere." So I started playing in nightclubs and in the first rock shows in Holland about sixteen years ago. We were already playing rhythm and blues, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, stuff like that. I started listening to the radio about this time for as much as I could, because I didn't have a record player. I just never got interested in the piano, it wasn't in my character. I'm kind of an ego-tripper I guess.
Jan Akkerman

I'm still developing. Leslies are my thing. I forgot about the Leslie sound when I left the Brainbox because I thought it wasn't original, and when I left they got two other guys who used them so I just said forget it. I've just started using them again, and they're so lovely, so beautiful; that sound, that rotating sound, you can't get it with no phaser, with nothing. It's so alive, it just spreads it around.
Jan Akkerman