John Abercrombie Quotes

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

Yeah, I grew up playing lots of jazz music in school.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.

I heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.

People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.

Jazz changes and all. But I don't know the names of what it is I'm doing.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.

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.

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

Thelonious Monk was one of the musicians I most connected with early on. I'm a huge Betty Carter fan, and the way that Abbey Lincoln and Shirley Horn grew immensely from the time they were young is so inspirational.

I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.

When I started music, I started out in Puerto Rico with classical music. But what really made me want to be a musician was jazz, and because I didn't grow up with jazz, I had to learn it from a very basic level. I had to go into the history and learn everything about the development of the music, all the players and all that stuff.

I don't enjoy jazz guitar in general. I don't enjoy listening to a lot of it. I don't enjoy the tone. In general I've found its role in jazz to be kind of difficult.