James McBride Quotes

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

'Black Radio' was pretty much a jam session.

Jazz has provided the framework for all the other stuff that I've done.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

The first thing is, jazz is one of the few things to let you know that there is a God and there is a creation.

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

When I started playing the bass, I became kind of fascinated by it and started investigating various styles of bass playing, and I was really struck with funk music, mainly American funk music - Stanley Clarke, Funkadelic and that kind of stuff. That comes out in a couple of songs like 'Barbarism Begins at Home.'

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at jazz. And I've done that on many occasions.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

I was exposed to jazz early on.

I'm an old Coltrane disciple just like I'm a Christian.

I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.

Jazz scares me. I've witnessed so many incredible singers and jazz musicians. Pop and soul music have always been the things that I felt like I could do.

The first time I listened to jazz was when I was 8.

Everybody in all countries tries to play jazz.

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.

I hear many extra-musical things somehow in Coltrane.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be some jazz.

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.

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.