Musical Eras Quotes

Dates and periods are of interest only to the student of musical history.

I've been listening to the old school hip-hop stuff and rock like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever. Dates and periods are of interest only to the student of musical history. . . . All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago. All good music, whatever its date, is ageless - as alive and significant today as it was when it was written

I stick to playing Brahms, but I love listening to Led Zeppelin, and I've also been a big fan of Earth Wind and Fire since the Seventies and of The Gap Band since the Eighties.

Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me.

When you look back on music history, it falls into these neat periods, but of course, the period you yourself are living through seems totally scattered and chaotic.

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled.

A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.