Bebop Music Quotes

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.

I've always thought that jazz needs to be heard by a wider audience in Puerto Rico. I want to put together a series of free concerts in the small towns - one with Miles Davis music, another with bebop, maybe Duke Ellington. I want younger people to see what is possible.

Birth of the Cool' became a collector's item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy's music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren't a fast listener, you couldn't catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn't sweet, and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss.

What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience.

Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.

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

I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me.

Musically, the bebop route was magnificent, but businesswise, it was the dumbest thing I ever did.

There was a lot of freedom, so bands in those days did not have to play for the public. They played for club owners that enjoyed music. You know, what happened - there was a lot of clubs that had bebop music or different forms of music. It was great for musicians.

If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music.

I really enjoy listening to players on the cusp of swing into bebop like Charlie Shavers, Clifford Brown and Clark Terry. They balance immense facility on their instrument with rhythm, melody, and more complex harmonies of the time.