Bebop Quotes

What makes bebop legitimate is the fact that when it was done, it was illegitimate.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created.

[Bebop is] Chinese music.

Bebop is the music of the future (as soon as they learn how to play it).

Musically, the bebop route was magnificent, but businesswise, it was the dumbest thing I ever did.

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.

Bebop has set music back twenty years.

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music.

Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me.

Everything has a beginning and an end. Life is just a cycle of starts and stops. There are ends we don't desire, but they're inevitable, we have to face them. It's what being human is all about.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens.