Lester Bowie Quotes

Benny Goodman plays the clarinet. I play music.

I love jazz because it's so American; you know it's our Only Original Art Form. It just goes against the greed of corporate America and the Wall Street Banks that are destroying our economy.

I've never listened to jazz. It's just not something I ever paid attention to.

Among the guitarists, Wes Montgomery is fantastic. He's always good to let you know what the art form is all about. It's the same still life that everybody is painting, but in comes Wes Montgomery, and it's right there!

It's very hard to find a good comedy. I prefer doing comedy far over anything else because I think they're actually more profound. But finding a good one and a great ensemble is very difficult to do and I'm delighted that in these particular times there is so much interest in comedy and that comedy is having so much success.

The reason why the music [jazz] is important is because it's an art form-an ancient art form-that takes in the mythology of our people.

I think jazz and comic books are probably the two uniquely American art forms.

Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

Jazz is the language of the emotions.

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.

There aren't any labels - all jazz means is improvization and you can never play a tune the same way twice. So jazz spills over into everything.

In the year of 1902, when I was about seventeen years old, I happened to invade one of the sections [in New Orleans] where the birth of Jazz originated from.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I'll give it to them.

Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.

I could turn on my radio in the morning when I was getting dressed for school and hear Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman and think this is the music. Now that music is art. Ellington is art. At that time it was just what you heard on the radio. Cole Porter was just a guy who wrote pretty songs and Billie Holliday would sing them.

Bebop is the music of the future (as soon as they learn how to play it).

I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.

I like Thelonious Monk, he's so gnarled, he's like a piece of machinery that's pulled up the bolts on the floor and gone off on its own.

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

I called the great French violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and I said 'So, who's the new cat? Who's got the stuff? And he said Zach Brock.

Switch to piano! No. Really, if you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice. Of course, it would be best if you could actually sing with your own voice. The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. Therefore, the challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument or 'voice' that is outside of your body. I love that challenge and have for over forty-five years. As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

If you mess around with jazz, you better have a good drummer and a good bass player.

I don't believe that jazz will ever really die. It's a nice way to express yourself.

In 1993, I retired from the Art Ensemble of Chicago to devote myself full time to Buddhist studies and to the practice of Aikido.

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz.