Bird quotes Satchmo

When Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie burst into the jazz scene in the mid-1940s, much was made of the presumed animosity between the new and the older generations of musicians. Although there were some noises in that direction, let's just say that jazz journalism paid too much attention to celebrity status, fans and gossip.

Back in 1928, Louis Armstrong recorded this classic cadenza as the opening for his "West End Blues":

Charlie Parker must have been listening, since he used it twenty years after Armstrong, at least twice on record, both times while playing the blues, one at Carnegie Hall on Christmas day, 1949:

the other at St. Nicholas Arena in New York (St. Nick's), a couple of months later:

PS 2022-03-25: And a third one, on May 30, 1953, at Birdland with Bud Powell on piano and Charles Mingus on bass.

Musiciansʼ quotes: Carla Bley on (im)perfection

Photo by Lauren Lancaster / NYT/Redux

“Well, youʼre not going to get very far in the musical world without some kind of a defect.”

Carla Bley's reply to the late Lew Soloffʼs assertion that he could (indeed) play “everything and anything”, quoted in this profile by Ethan Iverson.

Jazz is... / Jazz is not...

That is the last paragraph of Martin Williams's review of the film I Want to Live (IMDB, Wiki), published on The Jazz Review (May 1959, p. 39).

This and other issues of The Jazz Review, a short-lived but groundbreaking magazine, can be read at the Jazz Studies Online website. You can download a PDF of the issue above, here.

Musicians' quotes: Marc Ribot on technique

I don’t want to impose some agenda on a song. I respect the ability to read the song, to figure out the song’s intentions. Chops need to be in the service of meaning. People who don’t get that are… dumb.

Marc Ribot in a double interview with Nels Cline

by Jim Macnie for the July 2011 issue of DownBeat magazine

Marc Ribot - guitar
Henry Grimes - bass
Chad Taylor - drums

Musicians' quotes: Maestro Lecaros

"There has to be a piano at home, not a freezer or anything like that, just a piano... not even a telly, but there has to be a piano."

Maestro Roberto Lecaros,
(b. 1944) Chilean musician, in a recent interview.

Peter Brötzmann and... Lionel Hampton

German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann (b. 1941), one of those guys who could make you a straight soprano sax by blowing on a curved one, is one of the stalwarts of European free improvisation. He came up at the end of the 1960s and, while he might be expected to have drawn inspiration for similarly-minded American players, this is what he says about the his seminal, groundbreaking, even violent Machine Gun (1968) and his unlikely model.

"I wanted to sound like four tenor saxophonists, that's the sound that I wanted... I got the idea from the Lionel Hampton band, the big band he had, with four really heavy saxophonists in the front line and they played unison. That's the sound I've been trying to get, that's what I was attempting with Machine Gun and that's what I'm still chasing"

Peter Brötzmann, interviewed in the November issue of Wire magazine.

Brötzmann will be, with his Chicago Tentet at London's Cafe Oto on November 9-10, as part of the London Jazz Festival.

Lionel Hampton: "Flying Home" (1967)

Peter Brötzmann: "Machine Gun" (1968)

Barenboim & Bird on improvisation

Improvisation is the highest form of art for me, because when you see a score for the first time [... T]he first reaction is gut, instinct [...] We only get to this possible stage of making music [as art] - possible - the moment we have digested all that and we achieve a kind of conscious naivete which allows us to improvise it, which allows us to play it at that moment as if it is on the spur of the moment. [...] It's a very blessed state in the life of a human being.

Daniel Barenboim in his 2006 Reith Lecture,

London, May 6th, 2006

First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that and just play.

Charlie Parker quoted by Artie Shaw in Gene Lees's book
Meet Me at Jim and Andy's

(Oxford University Press, 1988)

Other quotes (II): Pío Baroja

Spanish writer Pío Baroja (1872-1956), asked by a journalist about literature, circa 1918, also talks about music: 

[Works that look old, too touched up] are the ones which provoke enthusiasm in audiences. It happens in literature as well as in music - generally, unless the listener recalls the melody they will not like the work. Summing up will always be successful, because its context is already there [...] This kind of summing-up works may have some new elements, but the fewer new elements in them, the better they're liked by the audience.

Soon after he places himself within the audience.

Waltzes have always been very suggestive to me. Even though they're so worn down, so overused, they still affect me.

Pío Baroja, Las Horas Solitarias
(Ediciones 98, Madrid 2011, pp. 330 y 333)