Jazz Parker Quotes & Sayings

A portrait of the young Charlie Parker with a degree of vivid detail never before approached ... [Kansas City Lightning is] a deft, virtuosic panorama of early jazz ... This is a mind-opening, and mind-filling, book. — Tom Piazza

You've got to learn your instrument. — Charlie Parker

Dizzy, Duke and Charlie Parker were the greatest jazz legends of all time. — Milt Jackson

We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from. — Evan Parker

In those days before hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy, and before learning of the so-called bebop era
by the way, I have some thoughts about that word, "bebop"
my first jazz hero ever, jazz improvisor hero, was Lester Young. I was a big "Lester Young-oholic," and all of my buddies were Lester Young-oholics. We'd get together and dissect, analyze, discuss, and listen to Lester Young's solos for hours and hours and hours. He was our god. — J.J. Johnson

Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk — John Lewis

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. — Charlie Parker

The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o'clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus years non stop, just get up out of his sick bed, crawl up on the bandstand and play, the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all of these people give their lives for this, and they did give their lives, is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there's just nothing else you're going to taste that's as sweet. — Wynton Marsalis

To rankling poison hast thou turned in me the milk of human kindness. — Friedrich Schiller

I love life and I love that about people ... I adore the human experience, I really adore the ... I love the contradictions of people ... I don't mind being sexy and girlish and womanly, and all those things at the same time ... smart and very — Jewel

...Nothing puzzles God — Chinua Achebe

It's just music. It's trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes. The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it. It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible. — Charlie Parker

Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop. — Jack Kerouac

When I heard Charlie Parker, I knew that that was going to be the new wave, the new way to play jazz. From that point on, I was sold with ... the idea of bebop. — Buddy DeFranco

I don't know how long I can do this before I go sane, and I can't cope anymore. — Mira Grant

Whenever I'm in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here - like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things - but I couldn't do what they did. They were too good. — B.B. King

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. — Charlie Parker

Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s. — Roy Haynes

My grandfather was Bob Shad, one of those legendary jazz and blues producers - he worked with Charlie Parker and Dinah Washington, and he produced Janis Joplin's album [1967's Big Brother & the Holding Company]. He always owned small labels as well - he had a label called Mainstream Records in the 70s. — Judd Apatow

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is. — Al Jarreau

Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere! — Joe Lovano

I get a warm feeling among my books. — Anthony Powell

He'd been toting it, and checking it, and packing and unpacking, all the way since fate was on the river - that's how long - the Big River - Fate Marable and his riverboat caliope (Cleo seemed to recall), who hadastonished the landings between New Orleans and St. Louis with the wild, harsh, skirling Gypsy music, and left there, echoing in the young and restless even as it dies off round the bed; to linger with them thereafter, in the pelting roar of November midnights and the clickety-clack of lonesome valley freights, until they up one night and go after it in a battered bus, following the telephone wires that make a zigzag music staff against the evening sky - some variation of that basic beginning could be told for everyone who jazz has touched and altered. — John Clellon Holmes

I don't play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word 'jazz' only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that's fine. — Kenny G

Bop is no love-child of jazz. — Charlie Parker

Don't you know it's rude to stare?"
"I was not staring."
"You're looking at me like I'm your next meal. I believe I already wasted a glass of Pinot telling you to keep your hands to yourself, don't push me again. — Kerry Heavens

Dance, you jazz-mad puppets of fate, and — Dorothy Parker

Gather in your resources, rally all your faculties, marshal all your energies, focus all your capacities upon mastery of at least one field of endeavor. — John Hagee

I'm psychic," she said, and looked at me looking nervously at the lock. "Psychic. Not pshycho. I'm Jazz Parker. — Cath Crowley

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. — Flea

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls. — Aberjhani

Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days. — Evan Parker