Robbie Robertson Quotes

If I have to be considered any type of jazz artist, it would be New Orleans jazz because New Orleans jazz never forgot that jazz is dance music and jazz is fun. I'm more influenced by that style of jazz than anything else.

My dad loved black singers. So listening to New Orleans music, eventually I wanted to play an instrument.

New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.

People hear traditional jazz and think it's stale, where there are so many ways it can be opened up. With New Orleans and old-time grooves, there's no limit in what can be done with that. I want to break the stereotype of what traditional jazz is.

In the Bay Area, there was a resurgence of Dixieland jazz in the '40s - there was the Frisco Jazz Band, and Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band.

The blues and jazz will live forever... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

I find early jazz to be the most revolutionary music of its time.

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

And I loved Fats Waller. I love his instrumental abilities, his vocal abilities and his sense of humor.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

Blues and jazz are such a root to music.

Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.

I've often felt I've been born out of my time, and when I started Fairground Attraction in the 1980s, I wanted to be a 1940s jazz singer.

Blues was made for the recessed.

I like to listen to classical music... I like mainline jazz.

My entire life has really revolved around music that was written about the time that I was born, 1908, to just before the First World War and shortly after it. This music I've always known, and it is that music that's most important to me.

All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

My father's record collection was full of New Orleans music of all kinds. I used to listen to the radio in New York, and all there was on it at the time was Madonna and Michael Jackson, so it sort of passed me by.

I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me - it resonated.

Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

The music that I listen to is very minimalistic. I listen to a lot of old blues that is just guitar and vocals.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.