Ray Brown Quotes

The first jazz pianist I heard was Thelonious Monk. My father was listening to an album of his called 'Monk's Dream' almost every day from the time I was born.

Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.

I'm a pianist - I studied jazz piano in college.

More than anybody else I'd like to thank Count Basie for teaching me how to perform.

And Lennie Tristano I like a lot, I still like him.

Thelonious Sphere Monk: there's not a more perfect name to fit his compositions than that name.

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.

I wanted to play some more grown-up music - jazz.

Art Tatum was a genius.

When I came out of the conservatory, the first thing I did was to go see Thelonious Monk.

I really love Dinah Washington and anything live from her - she had some of the greatest jazz musicians in the whole world, and sometimes she would be with a big band, and sometimes she'd just be on stage with a muted trumpet, upright bass, and a piano.

I came through the bebop era, and to me that was enough.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

When I present the Charlie Parker book, I do a call and response that works quite well. With the Thelonious Monk book, I play the music and work with kids in a group to create a color wheel and show how the wheel can be mapped on a 12-tone chromatic scale.

I'm a trumpet player, and I sing jazz.

Chick Corea was a great influence on me, musically, as I was growing up.

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

I believe that blues and jazz are the two uniquely American contributions into music.

Duke Ellington was famous for hs very original harmonic patterns.

Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.

Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.

Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.

Jazz is the American’s preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires ...

Jazz music is the American's music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy.