Gunther Schuller Quotes

I've had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.

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

Catch Harry Belafonte. He's got a helluva rhythm section.And so have the Pointer Sisters. And that little guy with Sammy Clayton. He plays the whole show with 40 members.

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.

I like being in the back. I've done that for so many years, I'm really comfortable doing it. I don't like the solo thing as much as I like playing drums behind someone.

Hamp would ask me about tempos in the band: 'Jacquet,' he'd say, 'knock off that tempo.' A lot of jazz musicians didn't prefer to play for dancers, which was their loss, really. But good jazz has always had that dance feel.

So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.

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

It was my band. I organized the band and Dizzy was in the band. Dizzy was the first musical director with the band. Charlie Parker was in the band. But, no, no, that was my band.

I've met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they're all funny.

I had listened to Joe Turner. When they'd book Joe there, I'd play the blues behind him.

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 worked with a guy, I can't think of his name, him and his wife, and one of them had a saxophone and the other played drums. It wasn't a regular job but I did a few gigs around home with them.

I listen to Bill Stewart play the drums and when I have finished doing that, I listen to Bill Stewart.

I've always wanted to record a jazz record. I did one in the '70s with Barbara Carroll. It's been a journey.

Plus I am being hounded by all the fabulous new drummers, Bill Stewart at the head of the pack.

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

I saw Al Foster with Miles Davis the other week. It was beautiful. But, the whole thing was, Al Foster played as well as everybody else, but all of them were quite brilliant under Miles Davis' direction.

I always wanted to sing a jazz record.

I want to stay with the Jazz.

If you don't have a good rhythm section, your band is toast; you're a bar band. Good rhythm section, you've got a chance to get out of the bar.

Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

The Batiste family is a large musical family in Louisiana, out in New Orleans. People go to New Orleans, and if they go to any club, four days out of the week I guarantee you that you will find a Batiste playing in the ensemble.

For me, it's always easier playing with a drummer.

I've never listened to jazz. It's just not something I ever paid attention to.