Jazz Arrangement Quotes

I feel very honored to be playing with Bill Pierce. He's such a great musician.

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.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

See, we started out with a foundation of blues. But then we added people like Miles Davis and John Coltrane to the mix and gave rock n' roll a much more complex structure. It made it possible to play more than three chords.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept. He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

When I found the music of Monk I finally found music that fit that horn. Every one of his tunes fit it perfectly.

To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.

I haven't a great jazz band, and I don't want one.

I think that the jazzy approach that I have is based on the way that I hear music and in the way I play a supporting role to the other people in the band.

To most jazz critics I was basically Kenny G.

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

Even though the music I make gathers influences from all over the place, I feel that the core of what I do comes from the jazz tradition. In terms of improvisation, interaction, feel and overall concept, Jazz is my main source of information and inspiration.

That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.

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

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

I love playing jazz because I love the freedom you have to improvise. It has given me a feeling in my classical repertoire of creating the atmosphere of the here and now.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

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

I already experimented with free jazz in the 1960s and, in my opinion, to play free jazz, you have to be a perfect musician and a perfect human being - and none of us are!

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.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.