I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on.
Art Tatum was a genius.
No one sits in front of a drum set and thinks they invented it all out of whole cloth. The fact that the set is there means that you've got some dues to pay to Baby Dodds.
I believe that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the 20th century, they will look at Miles, Bird, Clifford Brown, Ella and Dizzy, among elders as our Mozarts, our Chopins, our Bachs and Beethovens.
I appreciate men like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins very much.
Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.
Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.
Clifford Brown was in the jazz circles considered to be probably the greatest trumpet player who ever lived.
I picked up some wonderful things just listening to other pianists that I appreciate, and that would be Herbie Hancock, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Horowitz, and Art Tatum. Those are the pianists I really enjoy and admire.
Tony Williams, Billy Cobham and Lenny White; some of those guys were big influences on me.
There's a steady forward march of a creative process that some of us stay with and don't give up - that should be an admirable thing - from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to Miles to Ornette and some people who are not even known today - some kids coming up - people who are out to change the world.
If you got every single artist in the world in one room, and you put Miles on one side and Prince on the other side, those are the two people that everybody would be trying to get a glimpse of. And Michael Jackson would be the other one.
When you think about John Coltrane, in my opinion - and I think I share this opinion with a lot of people - his approach to music changed other people's approach to music.
I've worked with a number of big bands, but there's nothing in life like the Basie band.
Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.
If we are going to list guitar influences, the biggest one by far is Wes Montgomery. Also, Gary Burton was obviously huge for me in a number of ways. But beyond that, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard.
Whenever I'm in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here - like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things - but I couldn't do what they did. They were too good.
