Jazz Revolution Quotes

I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.

Jazz in the 1920s and '30s was dance music, teenage music for parties, for being wild and young. There's this punk feeling I really love. It was something so radical and different and new and not codified. People didn't have a definition of what they were doing.

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.

It's one thing to just play a tune, or play a program of music, but it's another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what 'Kind of Blue' did.

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

When I heard Charlie Parker, I knew that that was going to be the new wave, the new way to play jazz. From that point on, I was sold with... the idea of bebop.

I was interested in Armstrong to begin with because he is the most important figure in Jazz in the 20th Century. There's simply no question about it. I mean, if you're going to compare him to somebody, it's Shakespeare in terms of centrality of the tradition, in being at the beginning of it.

In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.