Louis Armstrong playing trumpet on the Judgment Day.
I feel very honored to be playing with Bill Pierce. He's such a great musician.
I'm a great jazz fan.
Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?
What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.
Mostly I play with records. I play with my friend Bill Evans.
I've met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they're all funny.
I think jazz has given me freedom with my voice.
Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.
I made the tenor sax - there's nobody plays like me and I don't play like anybody else.
I wanted to be Gerry Mulligan, only, see, I didn't have any kind of technique. So I thought, well, baritone sax is kind of easier; I can manage that - except I couldn't afford a baritone, so I bought an alto, which was the same fingering.
I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.
There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places.
I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.
Grover Washington was my main influence, and when I went to college, I started listening to more of the jazz masters like Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane.
You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.
See, we started out with a foundation of blues. But then we added people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the mix and gave rock n' roll a much more complex structure. It made it possible to play more than three chords.
I listened to Billie Holiday a lot in order to learn to sing. She remains one of the extraordinary jazz singers. But my intent is to become my own voice, to be able to interpret these songs in my own way.
The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.
Jazz music is the power of now.
Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept. He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were.
I listen to a lot of Freddie Hubbard.
I've always wanted to record a jazz record. I did one in the '70s with Barbara Carroll. It's been a journey.
I've always had a love for music, and it developed as I learned jazz, blues, and gospel. And I performed with jazz singers in New Orleans.
