Trey Anastasio Quotes

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.

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

Of course I danced a lot when I was making 'Swingers.' The swing music scene was big in Hollywood, and I went to places like The Derby. And, after I wrote it and was trying to get it made, I would go every week so I'd be good at dancing.

I fell in love with playing the trumpet because of what we call 'hot jazz' of the 1920s and 1930s, music that has a higher energy to it.

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.

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.

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.

Oh yeah, that was the thing to do at that time. This was before the new wave of bebop started.

We used to play the Savoy Ballroom, and we always had a boogie tune in the set. Bands like Tommy Dorsey used to do a little boogie woogie. The big bands.

The Big Band Era is my era. People say, 'Where did you get your style from?' I did the Big Band Era on guitar. That's the best way I could explain it.

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.

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

When I was 16 or 17 I heard the Count Basie band with Jo Jones and Lester Young and Herschel Evans and I couldn't believe it. They were the greatest swing band. I really fell in love with that sound. Everybody danced!

The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

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

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That's why I wanted the clarinet.

And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.

I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

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.

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

The three great moments of my life had to be the concerts of Ellington in 1938, Dizzy in '48, and Ella in '52.

The United States created the best popular songs that were ever written, and from the 1920s to the 1940s, it was a renaissance period. It stopped in 1950.

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

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.