Herbie Mann Quotes

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

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.'

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.

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.

Grover Washington was my main influence, and when I went to college, I started listening to more of the jazz masters like Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane.

But sometimes that title 'jazz' can vex people who think they know exactly what jazz always is and will be.

It's funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don't learn jazz in school.

I don't know how much more what I've done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There've been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.

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

I hear many extra-musical things somehow in Coltrane.

I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.

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.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

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

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.

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

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.

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

I'm an old Coltrane disciple just like I'm a Christian.

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.