American Jazz Quotes

Everybody I know in England was raised on Mose Allison.

When I was young, I never bought records because my brother Joseph played saxophone and had a record player. I loved listening to his records: The Dorsey Brothers, Duke Ellington, all the big American jazz bands, and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Ernestine Anderson, and Kitty White, a singer from the US who was a friend of Nina Simone. Nobody in America seems to know about her, but she was quite popular in South Africa.

What really swings is the music of the United States, Cuba, the Caribbean and vicinity, and, of course, Brazil. The rest is all waltzes.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

I was a beginner again. I practiced hard and used to listen very closely to recordings of American jazz drummers such as Tony Williams and Kenny Clarke.

We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.

It's not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

From the small clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where he began playing saxophone to world tours for the biggest of the big bands, Benny Carter redefined American jazz. From the start, his fellow musicians said the way he played the sax was amazing. They say that about me, too. (Laughter.) But I don't think they mean it in quite the same way.

Clark Terry is an American Master. I love to listen to him, particularly 'Mumbles.' I was so delighted when we received degrees together, along with Edward Kennedy, at the New England Conservatory in 1997.

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.

For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.

I grew up watching American films, listening to American music, and it's a big contribution to the rest of the world. I mean, American jazz, for me, is the best thing culturally that America has produced.

We were the first small American jazz group since Sidney Bechet in 1927 to play for the public in Moscow and Leningrad.

At 14 and 15, I used to listen to Tito Puente, Dave Valentine and everything that was happening with American jazz. I love it.