Jazz Scene Quotes

Washington D.C. and the entire DMV area are very dope places because they're such musically-inclined areas.

Since about 1980 Kenny Werner has been one of jazz’s unsung heroes

Our nights didn't begin until after noon. Because in the old days, you'd start Birdland at 8:30 or 9 pm and play until 4 in the morning. Then you'd go out to the corner and talk to a couple of musicians - I used to talk to Oscar Pettiford a whole lot - you'd stand there till 7, 8 or 9, or else go down to the jam session at Minton's.

What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful.

Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

[Lee Morgan] was the only young cat that scared me when he played. He had so much fire and natural feeling. I had more technique, but he had that feeling. People seemed to like him more than they like me at the beginning.

I went up to his [Hank Jones'] house and there were four guys there: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach. Not a bad place to be. Scared shitless, but a nice place to be on my second day in New York.

Karl Johnson, my first piano player at Milt Trenier's, he just swung really hard and gave me a sense of really belonging to the jazz scene.

What's funny in 'The Mayor of MacDougal Street' is how Dave Van Ronk talks a lot about the time and how exciting it was and how electric it was.

I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.

Saturday night is your big night. Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time. Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich. And be glad of it. And they really liked the low-down blues.

When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn't stand funk.

Dizzy Gillespie would come by, eating gumbo. It was crazy. My grandparents were friends with all of them. Dee Dee Bridgewater, all of them, they'd come through.

I was able to work with the best musicians in Kansas City starting when I was really young.

When I got started in New York, it wasn't like it is now. If you were different from Miles and Dizzy, it was very difficult to make gigs and make money with your own style.

Plus I am being hounded by all the fabulous new drummers, Bill Stewart at the head of the pack.

Los Angeles has always been overlooked as far as jazz, and just high-level music in general. But, like, my dad's a musician, so I've grown up around so many brilliant musicians that nobody outside Los Angeles knows about.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

There's so much music going on in New Orleans.

In New Orleans, you can pitch a rock and hit a great trumpeter.

If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.

I took several trips to New Orleans and met with people who had intimate knowledge of the underbelly of the city in the 1950s. The meetings were both fascinating and terrifying.