Dave Van Ronk Quotes

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

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.

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.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about jazz.

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

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

My aunt Ruth Brown was a jazz musician. I got hooked on it at a young age, understanding what John Coltrane was doing playing two notes on the saxophone at the same time, which is impossible.

I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

My father is a jazz musician, so I grew up hearing jazz. My parents loved it, but I didn't like it. It went on for too long. Yes, I had certain teachers that really inspired me, like Danny Barker, and John Longo. And I had no idea that I would have any impact on jazz.

Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

I think jazz is actually quite unforgiving in its disdain for nostalgia. It demands creativity and change at its highest level.

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

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.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

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

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

I wanted to be a jazz musician.