Jazz Musicians

"We all know the Django story, but the actual recorded evidence is something else altogether. The hot jazz genius was a formidable speedster, yes, but his playing was also full of life and love, a romanticism that belongs to another century. Django is revered as much for his feel, his tone, and his heart as he is his technical prowess. A master of his art whose influence is felt far and wide, Django is proof that talent will always find a way to turn a setback into an advantage."

"There are many emulators, but there is only one Tommy Emmanuel. Has he ever dropped a note? Or sounded anything less like God decided to inhabit an Australian dad and pick up the guitar? Lightning speed, skills for miles and miles, and fingers blessed with the tone of the gods, Tommy Emmanuel has it all. He could make wire stretched across a plank of wood sound good. What he does with a guitar tuned to standard, with nothing but a pick and his imagination, is a wonder to behold. Emmanuel is both showman and showstopper."

"At this point, the guys behind Big Gigantic are bona fide funk experts."

"Staying high was my first priority; playing was second; girls were third. But the first thing really took all my energy."

"A warm and gregarious guitarist, Bucky Pizzarelli carried the torch for traditional jazz and swing well into the 21st century. Influenced by innovative guitarists like Django Reinhardt and George Van Eps, Pizzarelli was known for his skill on both the six- and seven-string guitar."

"Joe Pass did the near-impossible. He was able to play up-tempo versions of bop tunes such as "Cherokee" and "How High the Moon" unaccompanied on the guitar. Unlike Stanley Jordan, Pass used conventional (but superb) technique, and his Virtuoso series on Pablo still sounds remarkable decades later."

"If there's one electric jazz guitarist who can be said to be the living embodiment of the instrument's history, it's Bucky Pizzarelli. He plays rhythm guitar in the spirit of Freddie Green and is noted for his amazing chorded soloing."

"You don't often see a musician that is able to play jazz. And even less often do you stumble upon a guitar player that's as nearly as good as Joe Pass was. And what made him so unique and great was his chord-melody style playing combined with fingerpicking and impeccable improvisational skills. Joe didn't really need a whole band as he often performed solo or in duo and trio formations."

"[Ellis was] an excellent bop-based guitarist with a slight country twang to his sound."

"One of the finest guitarists to emerge after the death of Charlie Christian, Barney Kessel was a reliable bop soloist throughout his career."

"There are a lot of ways to do a solo album. One way is to take a tune and work it out, decide on changes, intro, and ending, modulations, tempos – work it out, and go in and do it. What I did, though, was just go in, and somebody would say 'Why don't you play How High The Moon?' I'd say 'Yeah, that might be nice.' I had no tempo in mind, no key, necessarily. I just tried to make it from beginning to end. I found myself getting into traps and having to get out of them."

"Listen to the way Jamal uses space. He lets it go so that you can feel the rhythm section and the rhythm section can feel you. It's not crowded ... Ahmad is one of my favorites. I live until he makes another record."

"All my inspiration today," he [Miles Davis] asserts "comes from Ahmad Jamal, the Chicago pianist. I got the idea for this treatment of 'Autumn Leaves' from him."

"I'm still evolving, whenever I sit down at the piano [...] I still come up with some fresh ideas."

"[When asked how he practiced] With the door open, hoping that someone would drive down my street in a big luxurious car and hear me! [...] I was never the practitioner in the sense of 12 hours a day, but I always thought about music. I think about music all the time."

"[Jazz] interpreted the works of composers such as the Gershwins or Irving Berlin beyond their wildest dreams. Take the pianist Art Tatum; most of the body of work he did wasn't his own music, and yet it was totally his. That's a process that has allowed what is called jazz to add so much to the world's culture. Look at the Juilliard School, the New England Conservatory, institutions that wouldn't have thought of teaching Louis Armstrong – now Louis Armstrong is teaching them, they all have jazz departments, and they teach kids from all over the world."

"I always tried to divest myself of the music business. I wasn’t too thrilled with the music business at any time [...] So I have always sought to do other things."

""I do things differently," he asserts. "I put it down to my parents, and to being raised in Pittsburgh, which is unique. I was delivering papers to Billy Strayhorn's family when I was seven years old. It was Mary Lou Williams's town, Kenny Clarke's, Art Blakey's, Earl Hines's, Roy Eldridge's, George Benson's, Stanley Turrentine's, Earle Wilde [sic], the exponent of Liszt, Maxine Sullivan, Loren Mazel [sic] the conductor. My father was an open-hearth worker in the steel mills, but they got me playing the piano when I was three years old."

"When 1 was 7, my mother arranged for me to take piano lessons. They cost one dollar a lesson. She was a domestic. She walked to work to save that dollar."

"I was playing Liszt's Eroica etudes when I was 11 . . . though I can't play it now." (Jamal reflects on this with a laugh.) "It all made me eventually settle on calling this great music 'American classical music' instead of jazz. It's the only art form that developed in the United States except for American Indian art. It managed to survive because it's so strong and so natural and so pure."

"A guy that knows all these electronic things may be great [...] but a guy who knows acoustic and electronic is better. Just like a guy who knows Mozart only may be great, but a guy who knows Mozart and Duke Ellington is better. And a guy who knows Mozart and Brahms and Ellington is even better . . . It's musical depth perception."

"[In response to a comment ("I sometime-get the feeling that Jamal would rather crawl into the piano than off the bench at the conclusion of a performance, so deeply involved is he in his music") by critic Philip Elwood] Maybe so. But I regret that I still don't have enough time to spend with my instrument. I think I could become more at one with it if I did."

"If you're applying for credit and write that you’re an insurance salesman, or a member of the Chicago Symphony, you won't have trouble. But just write "jazz musician" and you can't even buy a sofa on credit."

"[Jazz and the European classical repertoire] In Pittsburgh we didn't separate the two schools [...] We studied Bach and Ellington, Mozart and Art Tatum. When you start at 3, what you hear you play. I heard all these things."

"When I pass a piano anywhere, I have to touch it or play it."

"[On maintaining high levels of energy into old age] It's a divine gift, that's all I can tell you [...] We don't create, we discover – and the process of discovery gives you energy"

"I listened to music from Tatum and Erroll Garner to Mozart. I've composed since I was 10 years old – I used to do 20% my own pieces and 80% other people's; now it's turned the other way. After a certain time you discover the Mozart in you, the Duke Ellington or Billy Strayhorn in you. It takes time to discover yourself. You also have to find and keep players who are in tune with what you're doing; you have that empathy, the quality of breathing together."

"I once heard Ben Webster playing his heart out on a ballad [...] All of a sudden he stopped. I asked him, "Why did you stop, Ben?" He said, "I forgot the lyrics." That's what Nat (King) Cole was talking about, "You have learn to live with a song.""

"Performing is like being the matador in a bullring. You have to be constantly concerned about what you're doing or you get gored."

"When my people were brought over here from Asia and Africa, they were given various names, such as Jones and Smith. I haven't adopted a name. It's a part of my ancestral background and heritage: I have re-established my original name. I have gone back to my own vine and fig tree."

"It was 25 cents here, $6 there. At $6, one gets to thinking it's a lot of money. So then economics started dictating the direction of my career, and that's when I started devoting more time to jazz. When I got up to $60 a week, which was as much as my father was making, I said, well, this is it. And I was doing that before I left high school."

"Miles, Thad Jones, Clark Terry, Gil Evans, myself—the reason we always stay young is because we've been part of three eras. We heard Lunceford, Hines, Basie at their peak--I was a sponge, I absorbed that era. Then it was the Gillespie-Parker era—we were still young, and again we sponged it up. Now we are living in the electronic age . . . and we're still listening."

"[On querying the permanent use of the word "jazz"] So was the word Negro ! Yet you hardly hear it anymore—it's now Afro-American or black. All sorts of linguistic changes are going on: Instead of chairman we now say chairperson in order to upgrade the position of women in our society. Jazz is an important-enough area of our culture to demand constant refinement."

"Years ago, when I was growing up and bands like Basie and Ellington came to the Stanley Theatre in Pittsburgh, where I was born, they were called entertainers. You can hardly use that word today, when men like Max Roach and Jackie McLean have tenure as professors at major American colleges."

"Though Herbie Hancock has the chops to share a stage with Miles Davis and to create such jazz classics as Watermelon Man and Cantaloupe Island, he may forever be remembered for a one-off novelty track called “Rockit”, a song that (along with its groundbreaking video) was all over MTV in the network’s early days. As cracking a track as Rockit is, it is not indicative of Hancock’s style of electrified jazz. However, it does showcase that he was that rare jazz performer who did not shy away from the wonders of technology. It received criticism from purists, but Hancock was used to it. He’d gotten the same sort of guff when his Headhunters group crossed the line into pop and funk music in the early ‘70s. Nevertheless, the man’s playing is impeccable."

"redefined swing for modern jazz pianists for the latter half of the 20th century up until today. I consider him to be the major influence that formed my roots in jazz piano playing. He mastered the balance between technique, hard blues grooving, and tenderness. You'll find Oscar Peterson's influence in the generations that come after him. No one will ever be able to take his place."

"A few months ago, Wayne Shorter and I were being interviewed after performing in a quartet at the . Before any questions were asked, the interviewer remarked that in previous interviews, responses from Wayne "tripped him out" so much that he would be discovering new meanings in Wayne's words for several days. He said that it wasn't just what Wayne said but how he said it that did the trick, and that he was looking forward to another mind-blowing experience. Even though I was the other interviewee, I was also looking forward to Wayne's profoundly creative and thought-provoking reactions to the questions. Reactions, not just answers, that are chock-full of wisdom. In his jovial way, and with an innately uncanny sense, Wayne says what a person needs to hear in order to expand himself. No, it's even better than that. It's more like, you feel that Wayne has gleaned deeper meaning from a question by using it as a springboard for an answer that will blow your socks off and perhaps change your life for the better. As a matter of fact, you might start to think, Wow, I didn't know my question had so much in it."

"We all have natural human tendency to take the safe route—to do the thing we know will work—rather than taking a chance. But that's the antithesis of jazz, which is all about being in the present. Jazz is about being in the moment, at every moment. It's about trusting yourself to respond on the fly. If you can allow yourself to do that, you never stop exploring, you never stop learning, in music or in life."

"[B]y the time I actually heard , I started picking that stuff out; my ear was happening. I could hear stuff and that's when I really learned some much farther-out voicings – like the harmonies I used on ' – just being able to do that. I really got that from Clare Fischer's arrangements for the Hi-Lo's. Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept... he and Bill Evans, and and , finally. You know, that's where it came from."

"Hey, man; I would never dare to sing alone and unaided. I mean, nobody would want to hear the sound of my natural voice. But by singing through this new machine, I can mix what I sing with what I play on the synthesizer and it comes out sounding like you hear it on Sunlight. [...] What it all means is that I can sing "I love you, baby" down while playing different notes with the same rhythm up on the synthesizer ... Now any keyboard player who can coordinate his playing with his singing can sing anything he wants to ... and be able to do all the things singers can't do that instrumentalists can."

"I didn't know whether Wayne was crazy or a genius. I knew something was there, but I couldn't get a handle on it. We were playing some club outside of Boston. After the gig, I got a bottle of cognac and went back to his hotel room and we drank. And we talked for hours. And I began to see that there were word games that Wayne would play. His whole approach was much more like poetry, if anything, than how we normally perceive standard conversation. His way of speaking was on a much higher plane. I did come to the conclusion that he was a genius, not crazy."

"I came back to New York looking for a piano player. I found him in Herbie Hancock. I had met Herbie about a year or so earlier when the trumpet player brought him by my house on West 77th Street. He had just joined Donald's band. I asked him to play something for me on my piano, and I saw right away that he could really play. When I needed a new piano player I thought of Herbie first and called him to come over. I was having and over so I wanted to know how he would sound with them. They all came over and played every day for the next couple of days, and I would listen to them over the intercom system I had hooked up in my music room and all over the house. Man, they sounded too good together. On around the third or fourth day, I came downstairs and joined them and played a few things. [...] I knew right away this was going to be a motherfucker of a group."

"I remember we were at some club in Detroit, and playing all kinds of crazy things behind George, while behind Miles we played really straight. And Miles said afterward, "Why don't you play like that behind me?" That's when Tony and I began playing our little musical game behind Miles. After only four days, it turned around and he was leading us. And Miles began playing different after that. It was the most uncannily rapid adaptation I could ever imagine."

"I realized I could never be a genius in the class of Miles, Parker or Coltrane, so I might just as well forget about becoming a legend and just be satisfied to create some music to make people happy. I no longer wanted to write the Great American Masterpiece."

"Tony would lead the tempo, and Herbie was like a sponge. Anything you played was cool with him; he just soaked up everything. One time I told him that his chords were too thick, and he said, "Man, I don't know what to play some of the time." "Then, Herbie, don't play nothing if you don't know what to play. You know, just let it go; you don't have to be playing all the time!" He was like someone who will drink and drink until the whole bottle is gone just because it's there. Herbie was like that at first; he would just play and play and play because he could and because he never did run out of ideas and he loved to play. Man, that motherfucker used to be playing so much piano that I would walk by after I had played and fake like I was going to cut both of his hands off."

"I'm not a chauffeur. Nobody would have bought any of my records if I were. I'd have had nothing to say. I'm supposed to be presenting things to the public, not accepting requests. I call the shots. They don't have to like it. I really wanted to develop my career in such a way that I have the freedom to do what I want to do, and not have that considered bizarre. I think I'm finally at that point. People are no longer surprised when I come out with something different. I've done it enough now. That's what I've wanted all this time."

"A lot of times I would let Herbie play no chords at all, just solo in the middle register and let the bass anchor that, and the shit sounded good as a motherfucker, because Herbie knew he could do that. See, Herbie was the step after and Thelonious Monk, and I haven't heard anyone yet who has come after him."

"For as long as I can remember, the guitar and music itself is the thing that has gotten me through everything. Whatever it is I'm thinking about, or worrying about, or feeling good about -- anything -- the music has just been there. It's sort of like a model for the way things could actually work somehow. The music itself, just being immersed in the melody and the harmony and the rhythm of it, is so extraordinary, but then I think also all the people I've known... As soon as I started to play, it caused this circle of people to be there where everything was cool somehow."

"Family is very important to me because my own family was so disruptive ... Me and my brothers and sister were like ping pong balls, we didn’t know where we would end up."

"That did it for me, the applause, the vibe…I said, “that’s it man, that’s what I want to do. Forget the art.”"