Chuck Mangione Quotes

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

I haven't been afraid of John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Bill Evans or Wayne Shorter or Herbie Hancock. Why would I be afraid of the Beatles?

Bud Powell's probably the biggest influence on my piano playing.

I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.

Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'

I like to listed to the adventurous guys - the Coltranes, Miles Davis, the guys who just let it loose.

I appreciate men like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins very much.

I haven't a great jazz band, and I don't want one.

What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

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

As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke.

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.

My father was incredible on trumpet and played with the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie.

I grew up in the Great Depression, and the jazz artists and Dixieland musicians were at the core of our communications and enjoyment. They were not passing fancies. They are something that is, and will be, listened to again and again. I have a space of reverence for some of those old jazz stars such as Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong.

I always wanted to sing a jazz record.

I wanted to keep pushing the musical ideas I had about jazz, music from Africa and the Caribbean.

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.

My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

My dad listened to a load of jazz - Mahavishnu, Weather Report, Herbie Hancock.

Jazz doesn't have much to do with how I write songs, but I am a big fan. My favorites are Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal, and Mose Allison.

Joseph Zawinul and Toots Thielmans, in my opinion, are the only Europeans who can play rhythm-and-blues.

I hear many extra-musical things somehow in Coltrane.

One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.