We’re here to have a ball.
You can’t seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues – you can’t seperate it. Because that’s where it all started, and that’s where it all come from – that’s where I learned to keep rhythm – in church.
Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.
It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.
If you feel like tapping your feet, tap your feet. If you feel like clapping your hands, clap your hands. And if you feel like taking off your shoes, take off your shoes. We are here to have a ball. So we want you to leave your worldly troubles outside and come in here and swing.
When it comes to music, don’t lie to yourself; just tell yourself the truth.
Music washes away the dust of every day life.
The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.
If you follow your passions, you’ll never work a day in your life.
I’m not playing for other musicians. We’re trying to reach the guy who works all day and wants to spend a buck at night. We’ll keep him happy.
I am very aware that so little has happened to the electric guitar from the time that it was conceived to now; where there are so little changes made where there should be drastic changes made. If we were to put our heads together and start thinking about modern technology we would be much more advantaged with the electric guitar than we are. I think that we’ve been stagnant for many years.
Bird said he worked as dishwasher at Onyx Club on 52nd St. in the early 1940s just to hear Art Tatum play.
Working with Benny was important for me and for black musicians in general.
The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
I wanted something very dense, something that would sustain long and more pieces of wood that would be soft, sweet, for more of a mellow sound.
Miles Davis was a part of my life from 1947 on. I was born in 1941 and I first heard him in 1947 on a 78 rpm. And then I followed his career, starting with his first solo album in 1951. He was an icon and inspiration and a mentor to me.
Sometimes I think I was making music through the wrong end of a magnifying glass.
True Jazz lovers understand the rhythms are infectious because they are the roots.
I learned to play guitar on my lying back while I was bed-ridden. I only thought to record the songs because sometimes I would I couldn’t remember what I had just done. Eventually I started singing, because I thought if I sang it that would help to remember even more. But I wasn’t trying to sing. And then one day-this is really weird -I just wrote a song. It came out at a rapid rate and I recorded it and I listened back to it and was like ‘Wow, it’s a tune’.
After you’ve done all the work and prepared as much as you can, what the hell, you might as well go out and have a good time.
The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative and larger enterprises that people do.
I’m using the insides of sounds to move around in a very subtle way which, I think, ends up being inevitable.
