Quotes About Jazz

I don't like totally free jazz, unless it's done by somebody like Coltrane, who did bebop and cool jazz, so he was allowed to go out there.

If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

Once I made the mistake of saying I enjoyed listening to Lester Young over Charlie Parker, which solicited the response: "What the hell do you know?" It was true, I only knew what I liked, but in the often too-serious jazz scene, it seems what one likes isn't valid unless backed up by a twenty-page dissertation. That attitude probably accounts for a certain percentage of jazz enthusiasts who are pedantic bores.

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays? to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

Duke Ellington was famous for hs very original harmonic patterns.

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

My thing was, I loved music. I played music: I played the saxophone. So the little bit of music knowhow I had, I tried to implement that in every thing I did, from my style, my cadence, the way I tried to pause and stagnate it; that all came from John Coltrane and listening to jazz albums. Trying to rhyme like a jazz player.

We were either listening to jazz or Robert Johnson, the old blues man, but not to our peers.

I played the drums. I basically started off in drum line. So it was just straight percussion. Then I got into the drum set. I was in the jazz band and then all through high school I was in orchestra.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

I'm a jazz performer - I have to improvise with what I'm given.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

I first met Miles Davis about 1947 and played a few jobs with him and Sonny Rollins at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. During this period, he was coming into his own, and I could see him extending the boundaries of jazz even further.

The '20s are a very interesting period to me.

My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period.

It helps me to learn things in different languages, even if it's just phonetically, and to make myself vulnerable to other audiences by trying to reflect back to them the genius of their own cultures, and to do that, oftentimes, in new jazz settings, new arrangements. It's a way to show respect.

I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'

I wake up late, say 10 or 11, because we've usually been out and about town until 2 or 3 A.M. listening to music at the jazz clubs or hitting the jazz clubs post-theater.

I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.

Dianne Reeves, a famous jazz singer, would be my biggest influence.

Without the jazz influence, the Black Sabbath drumming would be very different.