Chico Hamilton Quotes

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

I've always had a close connection to both rock and classical music.

Me as an artist, I've ventured off into doing all types of music. I'll do a jazz album, you know what I mean.

They believed you can't mix rock, country, and rap, and that crossover is dead. I always knew it would work. And it will always work as long as you're really into it and like what you're doing.

I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.

Some people think I'm a rock 'n' roll musician and some think I'm a jazz musician but, for me, there is no difference.

People ask me how could I go from country to jazz. It's been a natural convergence for me.

Originally, we had a band known as Steely Dan. As we moved away from the band, we got whoever was appropriate for specific tunes. In a lot of cases, we gravitated toward jazz players who had more sophisticated harmonic concepts.

The other guys in Hootie were into rock. I brought the country influence.

In all of my years in this business, I've always been part of either a progressive band or a metal band.

I grew up playing in rock bands while I was listening to rap records. I like a lot of stuff.

Who's to say a blues man can't play rock and roll?

In the early '70s, I started to feel like Philadelphia soul was the black-sheep brother of rock and roll. I decided to try to get away from it.

As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n' roll and jazz standards.

There are always generic terms like 'Americana', but there are no boundaries as to where it can go.

I love hip-hop and soul, but I desperately want to challenge it and see what I can bring to it.

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

What I do isn't black music; it's just my music.

So, maybe you don't see blues so much in Styx's music but it is definitely part of Tommy's early music.

I'm a huge stadium rock fan, but I'm also a fan of everything from Massive Attack to Peter Gabriel, U2, the Police, Radiohead, and Coldplay. I've realized that I love all forms of music and get excited when any artist goes crazy and creates something that is an experience.

Jazz isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going to survive unless it's got some jazz influence.

I love music, that it changes so much, but I also want to keep a bit of the country roots to make it country. I don't want to go too far away from it, or I would do pop music.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

All along, I did what I was comfortable doing, which was to play the music I enjoyed and try to stretch the parameters a bit. Country and bluegrass and folk were my foundation.

The biggest misconception about us is that we're just a rock band. We think our music is a cross-section of many genres; a hybrid of what the six of us have grown up on.