Quotes & Sayings About Kansas City Jazz

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

Robert Altman made that movie Kansas City about the jazz scene in the city, and we saw that band all together, and that was an amazing show. That's what I got into. I like jazz. — Nick Kroll

Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful. — Jesse Stone

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

The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world. — Bruce Springsteen

What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar. — Damien Chazelle

Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have ... This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down. — Henry Louis Gates