Bill Dixon Quotes

Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.

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.

Music is changing. I'm just doing what I'm doing, and hopefully in the next 20, 30 years, some kids can take what I'm doing and change it again. If the music doesn't move, then it's dead.

So much of what I create has been due to the influence of Miles Davis and Donald Byrd, and so many of those that have passed on. Their music, their legacy lives on with the rest of us because we are so highly influenced by their experience and what they have given us.

Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.

The Gershwin legacy is extraordinary because George Gershwin died in 1937, but his music is as fresh and vital today as when he originally created it.

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

In America, for a brief time, people who followed Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn't last long. The result is that the kind of music I played in the '60's is completely dismissed in this country as a wrong turn, a suicidal effort.

I listened to King Oliver and I listened to Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp... I listened to everything I could that came from that place that they call the blues but, in formality, isn't necessarily the blues.

All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.

I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing.

I have tried, in all the ways I can, to make timeless music.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.

Stevie Wonder's 'Songs in the Key of Life' was on constant shuffle throughout my childhood. I remember my dad playing some stellar Max Roach albums as well.

I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

We're trying to do what Miles Davis would have wanted us to do, which is approach it as artists with his life as the canvas.

The way that I got involved with microtonal music was, frankly, through jazz.

I think 'Horace Silver' was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of 'Horace Silver.'

I want to make sure that I make music that lasts. I've been experimenting. I've been writing.

Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.

So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.

All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.