You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.
Blues teaches you to develop coherent solos, because the form you're playing over is so basic. You have to develop leads that go someplace.
People like Art Blakey and Buddy Rich, you look at them playing music, and it's just like looking at a heavy metal drummer. I mean, they're playing with the same amount of ferocity. It's not to say all jazz is like that.
You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?
Bebop is the music of the future (as soon as they learn how to play it).
In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.
I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.
I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.
I like referring to the saxophone and having a guitar lick instead. Same with the cymbals; having the cymbals and not playing cymbals.
In some ways Lester Young is the most complex rhythmically of any musician. He does some things which are just phenomenal.
It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.
Yeah, I grew up doing ballet and jazz and tap, but I stopped at the age of 25, and I've never stepped foot in a ballroom.
It's funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don't learn jazz in school.
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.
