Jazz Heritage Quotes

New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola.

I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

At the end of the day, I'm a New Orleans musician. Whatever that means.

My father was a jazz tenor sax player. He played in a lot of big bands. So I had that sound around me all the time. The first record that really caught my ear was Clifford Brown's 'Brownie Eyes.' I grew up listening to John Coltrane and Illinois Jacquet. This is where I come from... I love improvisational music.

I've always thought that jazz needs to be heard by a wider audience in Puerto Rico. I want to put together a series of free concerts in the small towns - one with Miles Davis music, another with bebop, maybe Duke Ellington. I want younger people to see what is possible.

If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.

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

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

All of us '60s pop stars came from old cities which had a jazz club, a folk club, a coffee house, and an art school.

Jazz isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going to survive unless it's got some jazz influence.

At Verve, my bookkeeper would invariably say, 'Well, why do you want to put out Roy Eldridge?' Or 'Why do you want to put out Ben Webster? They don't sell.' And I'd say, 'Well, whether they sell or not, they're important, they should be recorded and they're what Verve stands for, so we don't have to discuss that any further.

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

I grew up listening to the Neville Brothers and the Rebirth Brass Band.

Lars Ulrich is not a jazz drummer, but he grew up listening to jazz. Why? Because his father, Torben - an incredible tennis player - loved jazz. Jazz musicians used to stay at their house.

I was a total music nerd. I grew up on Perry Street in the '80s. My father wrote books about jazz, so I was always at the 'Village Vanguard.'

I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable.

I'm proud to acknowledge my debt to the 'Reverend Satchelmouth' ... He is the beginning and the end of music in America

Since I'm born here, my music will always have some New Orleans elements.

I believe that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the 20th century, they will look at Miles, Bird, Clifford Brown, Ella and Dizzy, among elders as our Mozarts, our Chopins, our Bachs and Beethovens.

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

I've played with jazz and toyed with it when I used to live near the St. Nicholas Pub in Harlem.

Isaac Smith sounded like Curtis Fuller, Corey Hogan sounded like Sonny Rollins, Terrace Martin sounded like Jackie McLean. Already, at 13, 14, 15 years old.