Carolyn See Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

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 still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

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

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.

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

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

I have a large collection of biographies about jazz musicians.

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.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.

I loved Art Tatum! And, through him, and other different jazz musicians, I actually found my technique.

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.'

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

When I started music, I started out in Puerto Rico with classical music. But what really made me want to be a musician was jazz, and because I didn't grow up with jazz, I had to learn it from a very basic level. I had to go into the history and learn everything about the development of the music, all the players and all that stuff.

It's funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don't learn jazz in school.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.