Billy Higgins Quotes

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.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

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.

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.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

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

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

Whatever it is, music should sound spontaneous, I've derived a great deal of pleasure from playing jazz and having the knowledge of that spontaneity.

Truth be told, I think jazz is a mind-set. It's not necessarily, like, this guy picked up a horn and did this or whatever.

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

Jazz was more of a tool for me to use to enhance my musicality.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

In my view a jazz musician is a great 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.

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.

If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

I think that the jazzy approach that I have is based on the way that I hear music and in the way I play a supporting role to the other people in the band.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

This is what really makes real jazz musicians: people coming out with their own voice.

I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.

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.