Jazz Legends Quotes

My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.

I didn't even respect singers until I heard Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong.

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.

I'm probably the only one in the world you can name that's worked with Billie Holiday, Louie Armstrong, Ella, Duke, Miles, Dizzy, Ray Charles, Aretha, Michael Jackson, rappers. 'Fly Me to the Moon' was played on the moon by Buzz Aldrin. Sinatra. Paul Simon. Tony Bennett. I'm the only one.

I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.

In L.A., I played with Joe Pass and Gabor Szabo. Mick Goodrick plays guitar in the Liberation Music Orchestra, and he's a real special player. Then I did a duet concert with Jim Hall at the 1990 Montreal Festival.

I heard Sidney Bechet play a Duke Ellington piece and fell in love with the soprano saxophone.

Mercer was very clever. He knew the way Southerners spoke and put that into his lyrics. But in that whole era, you had the best. Harold Arlen was just fantastic. Cole Porter was better than anybody, and Gershwin was Gershwin, y'know. Johnny Mercer started Capitol Records, and he brought in Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Nat King Cole.

You know, John Coltrane has been sort of a god to me. Seems like, in a way, he didn't get the inspiration out of other musicians. He had it. When you hear a cat do a thing like that, you got to go along with him. I think I heard Coltrane before I really got close to Miles [Davis]. Miles had a tricky way of playing his horn that I didn't understand as much as I did Coltrane. I really didn't understand what Coltrane was doing, but it was so exciting the thing that he was doing.

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.

Of course my uncle was a giant, but my dad, in particular, had the house filled with these great Dixieland jazz stars, really the best of them: Henry Red Allen, Willie 'The Lion' Smith, Buster Bailey, Cutty Cutshall, Tyree Glenn, Zutty Singleton. These are all big names in the Dixieland world.

I respected Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Those were my heroes, and they were 10 years older than I was.

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that.

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

Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

If Miles Davis hadn't died it would have been interesting to do an album with him, but there wasn't much else that would have got me into the studio... although Herbie Hancock has just been in touch about doing something and that would be an interesting combination.

I grew up in the Great Depression, and the jazz artists and Dixieland musicians were at the core of our communications and enjoyment. They were not passing fancies. They are something that is, and will be, listened to again and again. I have a space of reverence for some of those old jazz stars such as Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong.

I've had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.

I didn't know what the hell Charlie Parker was playing... I just liked the way he played.

None of the jazz greats made music for the purpose of you going to check out music before them. Michael Jackson didn't make music so you could go check out Sam Cooke.

A very few musicians passed across all decades. In terms of trumpet playing, Louis Armstrong does it of course but Sweets [Edison] is right up there too. He is unique, in every sense of the term.

Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

I love Ornette Coleman. I love Don Cherry. I love the way those guys play.