Jazz Styles Quotes

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

My dad was a huge big band and jazz fan, and we both sort of enjoyed be-bop, but man, it required so much skill to play it. And then there was cool jazz, the era that Miles, Coltrane, and Ornette ushered in, and that found a home in me. It turns out that that music was just really where I breathed.

People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.

If I'm going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.

I was exposed to jazz early on.

It is my belief that there is a tendency among the so-called 'modern' or 'hip' jazz musicians to consider styles other that their own, 'corny', and it is my contention that in actuality it is these musicians who are producing that which in future years perceptive critics will deem 'corny'.

Jazz changes and all. But I don't know the names of what it is I'm doing.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

The podcast 'A History of Jazz' began telling its story in February - 100 years after the recording of 'Livery Stable Blues' by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the start of jazz as a legitimate branch of music.

I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word 'jazz' means to them, and that's fine.

When I present the Charlie Parker book, I do a call and response that works quite well. With the Thelonious Monk book, I play the music and work with kids in a group to create a color wheel and show how the wheel can be mapped on a 12-tone chromatic scale.

Tony Williams, Billy Cobham and Lenny White; some of those guys were big influences on me.

If one takes all the styles in jazz harmonically from the earliest beginnings to the latest experiments, he still has a rather limited scope when compared to the rest of music in the world.

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

I read every book there was on jazz, about the original players - King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and all those groups. At one time I was fairly well schooled in that... I could tell you who played where and when, historically, way before my time.

I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.

The umbrella of jazz is so big and so wide. If you don't like saxophone, try a vocalist, if you don't like vocalists, try guitar.

A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.