Miguel Zenon Quotes

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

My foundation is jazz. I do all the things jazz musicians do.

My father is a jazz musician, so I grew up hearing jazz. My parents loved it, but I didn't like it. It went on for too long. Yes, I had certain teachers that really inspired me, like Danny Barker, and John Longo. And I had no idea that I would have any impact on jazz.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

Yeah, I grew up playing lots of jazz music in school.

The people at Jazz at Lincoln Center are an amazing group and have done a phenomenal job teaching kids and audiences of all ages about jazz.

If you don't already know about jazz music, how would you be exposed? How would get an opportunity to find out if it spoke to you? If you get exposed to it enough, you might find a taste for it.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

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

My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.

I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that.

Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.

People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

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.

Isaac Smith sounded like Curtis Fuller, Corey Hogan sounded like Sonny Rollins, Terrace Martin sounded like Jackie McLean. Already, at 13, 14, 15 years old.

Part of what I like to do with Brainfeeder is to get the younger kids hearing jazz, because they don't know where to go to really hear it. Brainfeeder gives me a platform to put out people like Kamasi Washington or Austin Peralta.

Thelonious Monk was one of the musicians I most connected with early on. I'm a huge Betty Carter fan, and the way that Abbey Lincoln and Shirley Horn grew immensely from the time they were young is so inspirational.

Jazz doesn't have much to do with how I write songs, but I am a big fan. My favorites are Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal, and Mose Allison.