Progressive Jazz Quotes

Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk

I always leaned toward free jazz... experimental jazz and progressive jazz. I feel like jazz is just part of the flavor and palette that you have as a musician to experiment with.

When Coltrane died, a void appeared in this music that has not been filled yet. He maintained a forward motion in his work and did not look back.

Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing.

For the most part, 99 percent of jazz is boring; you've heard it before. People aren't doing anything creative that's extremely modern. They tend to always be like "Let's do a tribute to Miles Davis!" All the new albums are tributes to history. It becomes too much at a certain point, it leaves us waving like "Hello? I'm alive, I'm here!" You know? So I really do feel like it needs some spice, it needs to be relevant to today's times, today's people, today's sound.

I've played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I've been fortunate enough to play with them, a who's who. All of those guys, I've been fortunate enough to have performed with.

So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.

I didn't like progressive jazz or anything. Rock was something I like to listen to.

I think I represent a more left-wing view of what jazz is.

The music that I make, the younger musicians are referring to it as 'stretch' music.