Quotes About Jazz

Kenny Burrell is a great musician and his music has helped to make me what I am today.

Lizzy Parks. Check this out, this is brilliantShe is a fantastic jazz singer definitely one to watch from now on, she's got a great voice and she's a great songwriter as well

Out of Coltrane's whole history, there are things which I think are great from all the periods.

One way and another I was having a ball - playing gigs, jamming and listening to fine musicians. Then came a crisis at home. My stepfather fell sick, and it meant I had to support the family.

As a kid, I would wake up, and there'd be a jazz funeral while I'm walking to school. And when I come home, you can find Rebirth band playing for a birthday party the same day.

Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor.

You cats mind if I make it a trio?' he asked me, and it was not a huge surprise that a dude of his appearance was speaking in Jazz Voice.

...and yes that was meant to be interpreted in a sarcastic bubblegum tone complete with clapping and jazz hands.

New Yorkers and people visiting New York from the world over go to the night-clubs of Harlem and dance to such jazz music as can be heard nowhere else; and they get an exhilaration impossible to duplicate.

Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.

I listened to the radio, so I was influenced by everyone from Michael Jackson to Milli Vanilli. But thankfully my dad had a collection of Cat Stevens albums while my mom was listening to jazz.

Jazz is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

The only time I've ever really felt envy is when I've watched people make music, which made my time living in the now-legendary Jazz Loft at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York a constant source of agony and ecstasy!

My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.

Is there one blues guy who was the most sophisticated and influential, like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong in jazz? Was it Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, or all of them? I think you have to pick all of them.

When I heard Charlie Parker, I knew that that was going to be the new wave, the new way to play jazz. From that point on, I was sold with... the idea of bebop.

I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.

Part of what I like to do with Brainfeeder is to get the younger kids hearing jazz, because they don't know where to go to really hear it. Brainfeeder gives me a platform to put out people like Kamasi Washington or Austin Peralta.

That's the kind of musical freedom I like: jazz, rock, blues, anything. You adopt different attitudes when you play different music.

When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.

Oh, I was a real Nirvana kid. I got into jazz because I listened to a lot of metal, Megadeth and that, and those guys play really fast and are virtuosos. I wanted to learn more about it, and I discovered that a lot of jazz guys played really fast, too.

If I'm going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.

Charlie Parker is my greatest inspiration as a saxophone player - anything that involves him entails a large amount of respect.