Henry Rollins Quotes

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.

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

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it's the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what's available, what somebody happens to play for you.

If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.

I didn't know what the hell Charlie Parker was playing... I just liked the way he played.

Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.

I've been listening to jazzmen, especially saxophonists, since the time of the early Count Basie records, which featured Lester Young. Pres was my first real influence, but the first horn I got was an alto, not a tenor.

I wish I could've been friends with Charlie Parker and played with him. That's my period. I feel real close to the '40s - and actually, I was born in '37, so I was a kid singing on the radio in the '40s. But I always dreamed of going to big cities.

I knew Charlie Parker, and he gave us such a gift with his music. He put so much into so little space, and it was tragic that he died so young.

I love guys like Charlie Parker.

I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.

As a very small girl, I listened to Charlie Parker and loved him and Max Roach and people like that.

I grew up listening to Puerto Rican music like everybody else. But when I listened to Charlie Parker for the first time, I said, 'How does this guy play so fast?'

In those days before hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy, and before learning of the so-called bebop era--by the way, I have some thoughts about that word, "bebop"--my first jazz hero ever, jazz improvisor hero, was Lester Young. I was a big "Lester Young-oholic," and all of my buddies were Lester Young-oholics. We'd get together and dissect, analyze, discuss, and listen to Lester Young's solos for hours and hours and hours. He was our god.

Bebop is the music of the future (as soon as they learn how to play it).

I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.

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

The band couldn't have happened anywhere else in the world but New York. That was the catalyst.

When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.

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

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.

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

The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.

I appreciate men like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins very much.

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.