Martin Denny Quotes

For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.

For years, Jazz At The Philharmonic albums were the only ones of their kind.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

The first records I heard were from Dizzy Gillespie and people like that.

When I came to New York after high school in 1959 and started to meet musicians, 'Hot House' was like a standard jam session tune.

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.

As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.

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

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

Be-bop wasn't developed in any deliberate way.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

I love classical jazz.

Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

It was by listening to Goodman's band, that I began to notice the guitarist Charlie Christian, who was one of the first musicians to play solos in a big band set-up.

Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

Jazz is progressive, and it's alive.

I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.

I've always loved jazz.

I like to listed to the adventurous guys - the Coltranes, Miles Davis, the guys who just let it loose.