Dexter Gordon Quotes

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I was trained in jazz, which I love.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

Jazz was more of a tool for me to use to enhance my musicality.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

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

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.

If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.

As a matter of fact, we put it down because we wanted to be jazz pickers.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

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.'

My favorite music is jazz, actually. It's what I listen to, it's what I was raised on, and it's what I prefer to sing.

Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.

I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.

Jazz doesn't have much to do with how I write songs, but I am a big fan. My favorites are Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal, and Mose Allison.

Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

Jazz musicians are the coolest people on the planet. Can I have some cool?

I hear many extra-musical things somehow in Coltrane.

One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

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.

I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word 'jazz' means to them, and that's fine.