Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.
Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.
... The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz....you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.
Hopefully, we learn to appreciate hip-hop here so that it doesn't go the way of jazz.
Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.
Rock music was the death of jazz in a way. I know there's a bunch of people who say jazz isn't dead, but I mean, rock 'n roll, you play three chords to 20,000 people; jazz, you play 20,000 chords to three people.
Bop is at the end of the road. Now everybody wants dance music.
Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.
When there's an imbalance in terms of what people get to hear, then that's negative. Then blues, jazz, it will die.
When pop and rock were taking over from jazz, and Sinatra was covering a Beatles song, it was all very new. I get to come at it from a different direction.
The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.
In America, for a brief time, people who followed Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn't last long. The result is that the kind of music I played in the '60's is completely dismissed in this country as a wrong turn, a suicidal effort.
All those years we'd spent learning these chops, and all those gigs in Germany where you'd play all night, and along comes punk. It has nothing to do with that. A lot of people went out of business.
We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
I still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over.
Jazz stopped being creative in the early '80s. After your acoustic era, where you had the likes of the Miles Davis Quintet, when it gets to the '70s it started being jazz fusion where you had more electronic stuff happening, then in the '80s they started trying to bring back the acoustic stuff, like Branford Marsalis and the Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton sextet. It started dying down from there. Miles was still around in the '80s and he was still being creative; he was playing Michael Jackson songs and changing sounds, but a lot of people were still trying to regurgitate the old stuff.
