Lester Young Sayings

#1. Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.

Sebastian Coe

#2. I'd been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I'd been doing wrong. I'd been singing too loud. One night I was listening to a record by Lester Young, the horn player, and it came to me. Relax, just relax. It's all going to be all right.

Marvin Gaye

#3. When I was 16 or 17 I heard the Count Basie band with Jo Jones and Lester Young and Herschel Evans and I couldn't believe it. They were the greatest swing band. I really fell in love with that sound. Everybody danced!

Illinois Jacquet

#4. We were all influenced by Lester [Young]. Listen to the records that he made with [Count] Basie. Nobody's got what he's got. He's still the daddy.

Zoot Sims

#5. I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

Sonny Rollins

#6. As much as I think John Coltrane belongs on the list, I think without Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, both of whom defined improvising on the tenor sax, there would not have been the evolution of the craft by John Coltrane.

Herbie Mann

#7. 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

#8. I'll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I'd never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I'd never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn't much like it at first.

Count Basie

#9. In some ways Lester Young is the most complex rhythmically of any musician. He does some things which are just phenomenal.

Lee Konitz

#10. It was not possible to broadcast any of that because of an agreement between Jackson and the family. Our legal advice was that we could not broadcast it.

Martin Bashir

#11. A young woman is dead. I don't care. You probably don't care. The police don't care. The papers don't care. The punks for the most part don't care. The only people that care are (I suppose) her parents and (I'm almost certain) the boy accused of murdering her.

Lester Bangs

#12. To recognize great talent, we must encourage dreamers.

Benjamin West

#13. What we need," he wrote, "is to turn out of colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of right; not young men who can make a good argument for either right or wrong, as their interest bids them.

Edmund Lester Pearson

#14. More often than not it's this fear of losing people and this attempt to keep people in the church that causes pastors to neglect seeking the presence of God

Sunday Adelaja

#15. Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.

Jeff Bezos

#16. The young accept the extraordinary as normal because they do not compare their lives with those of others when everyone is like them.

Julius Lester

#17. Well, the way I play, I try not to be a 'repeater pencil', ya dig? Originality's the thing. You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality you ain't really nowhere. Gotta be original.

Lester Young

#18. Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

Cameron Crowe

#19. For decades now, the Democrats have had a good gig buying the votes of government workers with outrageous salaries, benefits and work rules - and then sticking productive earners with the bill. But, now, we're out of money.

Ann Coulter