Wayne Shorter Quotes

The pianist Cecil Taylor is extremely melodic; the guitarist Derek Bailey is extremely melodic, and Ornette Coleman.

If you try to have a fashion show with Bach fugues and John Coltrane, it doesn't really work.

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

I'm actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I've actually experienced, and I don't think that's very common.

Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk

As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n' roll and jazz standards.

Me as an artist, I've ventured off into doing all types of music. I'll do a jazz album, you know what I mean.

I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.

Well, remember that we were all members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing.

I had heard Ornette a couple of times, but I didn't really know where he was coming from until we started the record and it was beautiful, Fred. It opened up my mind.

My roots and Victor's are jazz, basically, but these two young fellows that we have with us come out of rock bands. And they're tremendously exciting players.

A respectable-sized audience hasn't really been able to follow developments in jazz since the free jazz movement in the '60s. Some of them can't even get with John Coltrane. Audiences are diminishing more and more rapidly. Some of the top young musicians with something new to say can't get record companies to put out their stuff.

I love Ornette Coleman. I love Don Cherry. I love the way those guys play.

I love most melodic music - classical, reggae, big band, jazz, blues, country, pop, swing, folk.

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

If you looked at my iPod, you would get a trip out of all the different music, from the real heavy metal to bluegrass to classical.

It wasn't until I got out of the Army and I heard Coltrane's record 'Coltrane,' when he was doing 'Inch Worm' and 'Out of This World,' that I thought, 'Oh my God, you can do that?' And then I thought, 'OK, I better go back and listen to Eric Dolphy a bit.' And then I said, 'Hmm, I better pull out these Ornette Coleman records.'

I'm influenced by a lot of different genres of music. So I'm constantly trying to rework production and make things interesting in the live show and on records.

'Europe '72' was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years - being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.

David Harrington, who's the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.

I really like jazz and soul, but I also love so many other types of music, and I didn't want to be afraid to blend and experiment.

I feel like Europe is way more advanced. They're way more open to the definition of jazz. More cool. They're like, 'You want to do that? Awesome. You want to work with a rapper? Awesome.' They're not, 'Aah, it's not real jazz.'