Gary Burton Quotes

The beauty of jazz is that it can accommodate all styles. You can take jazz and put rock in it, and it's still jazz.

The job of the jazz people is to take it as far as it will go and that's what they're doing. But in the process of taking it out there, there has to be some times when they're not getting it right. It all depends on what you dig. I personally don't think the fusion of jazz with the heaviness of rock is working.

There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.

I guess that I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, largely because of 'Frankenstein' being such a heavy song - you know, it was really hard rock, almost a precursor of heavy metal and just the image of the synthesizer. I happened to be the first guy to get the idea of putting a strap on the keyboard.

I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.

The Mahavishnu Orchestra - when it came out, it was an explosion, completely unexpected as far as I was concerned. I was just forming a band.

There are no great jazz-fusion bands.

I'm not interested in a rock/jazz fusion.

Rock and jazz came together in a very powerful way on 'Barabajagal.'

We've now got a whole generation of jazz musicians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We've grown up alongside rappers and DJs; we've heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane.

I never had a problem moving between jazz and hip-hop.

To most people, jazz-fusion means this dreadful synthetic jazz-rock thing, this jazz-Muzak, which I detest. They also think of jazz as a specific form of music, while to me it's just the opposite.

I just can't stand jazz/rock. I think it's the worst thing that's come down the river yet.

I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.

Some songs are just going to be acoustic with just maybe some light background stuff going on and maybe violin or something like that. Or sax - I mean, I'm definitely having some sax. That's just what I love. It's going to be jazz-rock stuff. That's what I'm aiming for.

I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

Taxi drivers used to ask me what kind of music I did, and I'd say, 'Well, it's kind of jazz, soul, classical' - but that makes no sense to anyone.

In Montreal, there is a friend of mine at school who is a jazz pianist with an amazing voice, and we sort of have this fusion/soul/R&B/folk music kind of thing. We've been keeping it low-key and opening for some friends.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

I don't think you can mix classical music and reggae. It's not possible. But some producer in, like, Norway is going to put it together.

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

Artie Shaw was way ahead of most clarinetists and most jazz players.

Ray Charles, in his own way, it's like at the beginning, Ray Charles changed American music, not once but twice.

It's sort of what jazz would be if it stopped being snobby and what rock would be if it stopped being stupid.

One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.