Robert Glasper Quotes

Jazz changes and all. But I don't know the names of what it is I'm doing.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

I think myself, Jose James, and Robert Glasper are expanding the language - really reminding people that the umbrella of jazz is large and all-encompassing.

For the most part, 99 percent of jazz is boring; you've heard it before. People aren't doing anything creative that's extremely modern. They tend to always be like "Let's do a tribute to Miles Davis!" All the new albums are tributes to history. It becomes too much at a certain point, it leaves us waving like "Hello? I'm alive, I'm here!" You know? So I really do feel like it needs some spice, it needs to be relevant to today's times, today's people, today's sound.

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.

When I heard Charlie Parker, I knew that that was going to be the new wave, the new way to play jazz. From that point on, I was sold with... the idea of bebop.

If one takes all the styles in jazz harmonically from the earliest beginnings to the latest experiments, he still has a rather limited scope when compared to the rest of music in the world.

I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

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.

Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing.

I find as much inspiration from the forerunners of jazz as I do the modern-day innovators of jazz.

Some people say there was no jazz tenor before me. All I know is I just had a way of playing and I didn't think in terms of any other instrument but the tenor.

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.

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.

It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

Artie Shaw was way ahead of most clarinetists and most jazz players.

Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music.

I came along in the '60s having absorbed as much as I could up until then and added my own tastes and search into the equation. I guess that's how I see 'Now He Sings, Now He Sobs' in relation to the development of jazz in general.

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 still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over.

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.