Jazz Quotes - Page 22

I came to Berklee to study guitar, I really wanted to be a jazz guitarist, and I really came because I really wanted to come for Pat Metheny, and then when I get to Berklee, there's no Pat Metheny, he's not there, and so now what do I do?

Trouble follows me wherever I go. Thing I'm in is just a sack o'woe.

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

Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere!

Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.

I feel a lot more secure about the directions I take, than I might have, had I not practiced Buddhism.

Krupa's drums went through us like a triple bourbon.

The chief trouble with jazz is that there is not enough of it; some of it we have to listen to twice.

Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.

Phil Robson is a disturbingly good jazz guitar player!

I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.

You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it.

I have a lot of albums yet to do.

I listen to Neil Young and jazz and classical stations and, if my girlfriend's driving, it tends to be Hall & Oates.

Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.

My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.

Pain can be washed out with a song. / Pain can become jazz digested and transformed.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

Trumpet players are just belligerant, and cocky, and you know, just hard-headed.

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

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.

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

I feel that I have an obligation to jazz and also to myself to play as good as I can play.

Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.