Anat Cohen Quotes

I'm a fan of Jerome Kern and Gershwin. That's my kind of music.

I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.

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.

For many years, I've always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn't believe he was writing the songs he was writing.

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 was a fine pianist and he had a lot of great records and beautiful music.

When my dad went to college to get his master's from Loyola, he was playing Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven. But he played all that New Orleans stuff, too. I would go with my dad to gigs, pick up the piano and the speakers, and I would be like his roadie.

Honestly, I got the best of both worlds: groove of New Orleans meets the intensity of Texas. That's the best education I could have, the best experiences I could have.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

I love most melodic music - classical, reggae, big band, jazz, blues, country, pop, swing, folk.

I grew up playing classical piano and percussion.

I studied classical music for a year. Then, I studied jazz for a year at the New School, and then I got kicked out. You had to go to your class, so I don't know if that counts as studying. I didn't study jazz. I was supposed to.

I was a total music nerd. I grew up on Perry Street in the '80s. My father wrote books about jazz, so I was always at the 'Village Vanguard.'

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

Then I took 8 years of French Horn, first jazz, and then classical.

I was trained on piano - that was part of grade school and high school.

It couldn't have been more nerdy or bizarre, playing the clarinet. But I studied classical clarinet, went to the high school for music and art in New York City, and then found the guitar and the mandolin after it.

I love New Orleans. I love jazz. I grew up practicing jazz piano, and that's just been such a cool genre to me. There's a lot of talent there.

One of the reasons I wanted a sax in the band was that I loved Fats Domino's 'Blueberry Hill.'

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 love classical jazz.

I suppose I am more comfortable with jazz because I have been playing it that much longer, and also because classical music is a much more disciplined genre.

I actually started as a concert pianist. I had a scholarship to the Julliard School of Music.