Quotes About Bebop

There was a lot of freedom, so bands in those days did not have to play for the public. They played for club owners that enjoyed music. You know, what happened - there was a lot of clubs that had bebop music or different forms of music. It was great for musicians.

The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.

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

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

I came through the bebop era, and to me that was enough.

The new music, the bebop and modern jazz, wasn't music to him. It was choppy noise pretending to make music out of traffic jams.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but they weren't sweet.

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 still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

I really enjoy listening to players on the cusp of swing into bebop like Charlie Shavers, Clifford Brown and Clark Terry. They balance immense facility on their instrument with rhythm, melody, and more complex harmonies of the time.

Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

I grew up in Shanghai 'til I was 10 or 11, with one year in Tibet. When I was 5 or 6 years old, the American radio station came to Shanghai, and I used to love bebop and jazz, but I didn't know where it came from.

Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn't even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that's been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.

I've always thought that jazz needs to be heard by a wider audience in Puerto Rico. I want to put together a series of free concerts in the small towns - one with Miles Davis music, another with bebop, maybe Duke Ellington. I want younger people to see what is possible.

Bebop and hip-hop, in so many ways, they're connected. A lot of rappers remind me so much of bebop guys in terms of improvisation, beats and rhymes. My dream is to see hip-hop incorporated in education. You've got the youth of the world in the palm of your hand.

I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.

After Hiroshima, the musicians understood as early as anyone that Truman's bomb changed everything and only scat and bebop could say how.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

They were the younger guys playing at the end of the Swing Era, just playing their version of it. It became known as bebop, which sounds esoteric, but it was really just an offshoot of swing music." That offshoot, however, almost instantly changed jazz music's identity, advancing it from a danceable idiom played with the audience's casual listening pleasure in mind to a more personal and cerebral modern music.