Quote collection
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"I'd much prefer to hear somebody like Ed Thigpen [drummer with New York session group Stuff, and featured on innumerable hits] take a solo. I mean, that's what it is. I'd much rather hear that than the jazz/rock thing because it's blowing an aspect of jazz that I really like...the level where you can snap your fingers to it and you can groove to it. You can do anything to it."
"I just wanted to stop and try to get some perspective. [ A Period of Transition] it was just a matter of wanting to review the whole thing...to try and get some relationship to what I was doing."
"I deliberately try not to cater for the commercial market, so I can't see myself in competition, you know, with second or third generation rock stars."
"I don't like to wonder about it-I just like to do it. That's what I mean about the image stuff and all that. There's far too much emphasis being placed on that kind of stuff... the whole emphasis on what does it mean? Everybody has their own particular vision."
"I like [George] Benson because I just like it. I like that kind of style. I don't like the broken up kind of style. I don't like where you play for 16 bars and then break it up into what somebody's version of what birds twittering sounds like, or what the sound of the city is, or what New York sounds like."
"Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night."
"Whether you're writing a book or a song or whatever, you've got to be involved in it. It's got to come from the heart I think...that's what it's all about."
"I'll tell you what does impress me: the fact that a lot of the cats who were our idols are still out there doing it. That impresses me very much."
"There's novel reading, and then there's the other kind of reading. Take somebody like Carl Jung, the psychiatrist - now there's somebody worth getting into. With novels, I'm kind of fly by night. It isn't something I can be really consistent with."
"If you're with a good band and everybody's from the old school, it's different. When you're in your element, you're in your element and things just come. You don't have to drag them out or force them out. They just happen."
"J.P. Donleavy - now he's one writer I am consistent with. He's written books that I can definitely connect with. He has amazing insights which other people missed out on. Even with his descriptions of Northern Ireland."
"I can see more naturalness in basic blues, basic R & B, basic rock 'n' roll."
"Any artist is an instrument-and that's exactly why you can't do it all the time. You can only do it when it's happening, when it's coming through. No matter how much you may want to do it, if it's not happening then it's simply not happening."
"It's the same thing as a primitive of Africans, Indians, nomads or whatever - when they start getting up and doing their ritual and doing the dance, it's just what's coming through. It's the spirit. Rock 'n' roll is still primitive."
"If the spirit comes through in a Madame George type of song, that's what the spirit says. You have very little to do with it. You're like an instrument for what's coming through."
"I just can't stand it [jazz/rock]. It just doesn't sound right to me. It doesn't hit me...it doesn't get me...it just doesn't grab me."
"I just like any music to swing, no matter what it is."
"There aren't any labels - all jazz means is improvization and you can never play a tune the same way twice. So jazz spills over into everything."
"That's the jazz that I like - the stuff that has a soothing effect."
"I have some intellectual-type pursuits, like studying philosophy and stuff like that."