Edgar Winter Quotes

I believe that blues and jazz are the two uniquely American contributions into music.

Jazz is the American’s preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires ...

Jazz music is the American's music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy.

I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

Jazz told people about the special music that came out of America and about America in general and this kind of liberty and freedom that we have.

You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.

Darlin... be-bop is the music of the future.

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

I was into playing American music, especially the blues.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.

People are going to wake up to this great reservoir of music we've created in America - cakewalks, one-steps, boogie-woogie, country and western. I had a bit to do with one of those traditions.

I grew up with a heavy diet of gospel, folk, and blues because those are kind of the cornerstones of traditional American music.

Jazz was the pop music of its day, and all American popular music has stemmed from it one way or another.

Jazz infers a style, but creative music has a wider field and wider specification about it. We know it from people like Scott Joplin and on through Bessie Smith.

My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.

My music is jazz.

I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

My style of music is the great American songbook meets the pop world of the Seventies and Eighties.

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.

I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.

I want to make music that somehow connects to the things that I love in America music.

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.

Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.