Cassandra Wilson Quotes

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

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.

My aunt Ruth Brown was a jazz musician. I got hooked on it at a young age, understanding what John Coltrane was doing playing two notes on the saxophone at the same time, which is impossible.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

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 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.

One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.

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.

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.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

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.

I always leaned toward free jazz... experimental jazz and progressive jazz. I feel like jazz is just part of the flavor and palette that you have as a musician to experiment with.

In essence, I feel I'm more jazz guitar player because I write vehicles geared for improvisation.

What I do is I basically make records to please myself first and foremost, and so one of the most important things for me as a musician and a writer and a producer is to feel like there's always a sense of evolution and reinvention with each record.

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 went to jazz school. Not to say I'm a great jazz musician, but I studied under some great teachers. It was an important part of my life.

I'm not saying that in order to be a great jazz musician you have to be a great classical pianist first. But I am saying that it makes things easier when you can get around the instrument, and you have some idea of how to approach the various hurdles.

Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.

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.

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