Jazz Inspiration Quotes

I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

I was living in New York. Sometimes, our gang of musicians would go to Louis Armstrong's home and play records. It was a lesson, like going to school at night. Ella Fitzgerald was an inspiration, too, a unique artist. When you had an opportunity to be with people like them, you cherished it.

I once saw Dizzy Gillespie at a live show, and it made me want to go home immediately and start writing.

I feel like I'm a torchbearer for jazz, fostering its tradition but its future, too.

We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.

When I grow up I want to be just like Benny Carter!

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.

So much of what I create has been due to the influence of Miles Davis and Donald Byrd, and so many of those that have passed on. Their music, their legacy lives on with the rest of us because we are so highly influenced by their experience and what they have given us.

I played upright bass. I wanted to write great tunes, play the bass, be a band leader, and smoke a big funny pipe like Charlie Mingus. So I went out and bought the pipe when I was around 18 or 19 years old. You know even women smoke a pipe in Glasgow. I worked with Carla Bley and she smoked a pipe, which I find fascinating.

Motion Picture Soundtrack on Kid A was another Coltrane inspiration.

It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I'd love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.

I find as much inspiration from the forerunners of jazz as I do the modern-day innovators of jazz.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

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.