Top 71 Quotes About Charlie Parker
#1. 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
#2. Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix ... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
#3. I didn't know Charlie Parker well, but I spent some time with him, and he was articulate and well-spoken with a lot of curiosity about music and the world. But the only way he seems to be depicted is as a junkie. And that's not the full picture.
Benny Carter
#4. We loved one another, man. I mean all those stories about the rift ... there was no question of a rift between Charlie Parker and me.
Dizzy Gillespie
#5. Mozart was born Mozart. Charlie Parker was born Charlie Parker.
Damien Chazelle
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I didn't know what the hell Charlie Parker was playing ... I just liked the way he played.
Charlie Watts
#10. 'The Simpsons' is like Charlie Parker or Marlon Brando or Richard Pryor: Comedy couldn't go back to the way it was after 'The Simpsons' came out.
Eric Andre
#11. 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
#12. When I did 'Bird,' it was a surprise to some people, first because I wasn't in it and second because most of the films I'd been doing were cop movies or westerns or adventure films, so to be doing one about Charlie Parker, who was a great influence on American music, was a great thrill for me.
Clint Eastwood
#13. I listen to tons of hard rock and metal, like Iron Maiden, Motorhead, etc., but I also listen to Beethoven and Mozart, to Discharge and the Bad Brains, and to Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington. So I think there's merit to both the melodic punk and to the hardcore stuff too.
Dave Smalley
#14. In all honesty, I think I just played what I felt was right for me. And I think I would have done the same thing, even if I'd been born later, when Charlie Parker was influencing everybody. The truth is, I never gave it much thought. I just played what I had to play.
Benny Carter
#15. If you started in New York you were dealing with the biggest guys in the world. You're dealing with Charlie Parker and all the big bands and everything. We got more experience working in Seattle.
Quincy Jones
#16. 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
#17. There was not a lot of rock n' roll in the house. Our parents didn't think it was very groovy, and I tend to agree with them. If you grew up with Charlie Parker, Bill Haley wasn't very hip.
Elvis Costello
#18. Dizzy, Duke and Charlie Parker were the greatest jazz legends of all time.
Milt Jackson
#19. Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere!
Joe Lovano
#20. Charles Simic, when asked what he thought of Slam Poetry events: "They are fun, but they have as much to do with poetry as Elvis Presley had to do with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk".
Charles Simic
#21. When I present the Charlie Parker book, I do a call and response that works quite well. With the Thelonious Monk book, I play the music and work with kids in a group to create a color wheel and show how the wheel can be mapped on a 12-tone chromatic scale.
Chris Raschka
#22. I don't remember that I copied any guitar player note-for-note. But I remember copying Charlie Parker note for note.
Joe Pass
#23. What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience.
Henry Rollins
#24. Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.
Buddy DeFranco
#25. Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.
Sebastian Coe
#26. ANDREW: But do you think there's a line? You know, where you discourage the next Charlie Parker from becoming Charlie Parker?
FLETCHER: No. Because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.
Damien Chazelle
#27. Dizzy Gillespie recorded it with Charlie Parker in an
influential 1945 track (incorporating a much imitated intro - perhaps initially
intended as a parody of Rachmaninoff 's Prelude in C-Sharp Minor
Ted Gioia
#28. 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
#29. Some musicians, man, you hear the note almost before they hit it. Jimi, Coltrane and Charlie Parker were like that ...
Carlos Santana
#30. Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.
Roy Haynes
#31. The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.
Steve Erickson
#32. 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
#33. The only thoroughly beat Negro scene is the Maracanda, where most of the clientele are junkies and Charlie Parker is the squarest thing on the jukebox.
Ned Polsky
#34. It's in my stars to invent; I was born on Madame Curie's birthday. I have this need for originals, for innovation. That's why I like Charlie Parker.
Joni Mitchell
#35. If Charlie Parker were a Gunslinger, There'd be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats
Charles Mingus
#36. Nothing surpasses my performances with small bands, especially with Charlie Parker. A small band doesn't forestall creativity.
Dizzy Gillespie
#37. You can't steal a gift. Bird [Charlie Parker] gave the world his music, and if you can hear it you can have it.
Dizzy Gillespie
#38. I went up to his [Hank Jones'] house and there were four guys there: Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and Max Roach. Not a bad place to be. Scared shitless, but a nice place to be on my second day in New York.
Ray Brown
#39. It was my band. I organized the band and Dizzy was in the band. Dizzy was the first musical director with the band. Charlie Parker was in the band. But, no, no, that was my band.
Billy Eckstine
#40. I don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would have never written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker never would have played anything but swing music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and say, this is what I have to do.
Branford Marsalis
#41. I was blessed that I got married early and had a good wife. That sort of kept me straight. Probably I would have been like Charlie Parker, you know, involved in drugs or alcohol or something like that if I hadn't had this stability.
Dizzy Gillespie
#44. Parker Haas, crying Omaha, and his sleepless Rose.
Charlie Huston
#45. Don't play the saxophone, let the saxophone play you.
Charlie Parker
#49. I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes (harmonies) that were being used all the time ... I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive.
Charlie Parker
#50. At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.
Aberjhani
#51. Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play.
Charlie Parker
#53. 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
#54. When I first heard music, I thought it should be very clean, very precise. Something that people could understand, something that was beautiful.
Charlie Parker
#55. Belson came into the apartment with some crime-scene people and two homicide detectives.
"This guy," Charlie said, and looked at his notebook, "Spenser. He was impersonating a police officer."
Belson glanced at him. "We all thought that," Belson said, "when he was a cop.
Robert B. Parker
#56. I realized by using the high notes of the chords as a melodic line, and by the right harmonic progression, I could play what I heard inside me. That's when I was born.
Charlie Parker
#57. I'm very glad to have met you. I like your playing very much.
Charlie Parker
#58. Some guys said 'Here's bop!' Wham! They said, 'Here's something we can make money on!' Wham! 'Here's a comedian!' Wham! Here's a guy who talks funny talk!'
Charlie Parker
#59. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.
Charlie Parker
#60. If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.
Charlie Parker
#61. First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that s**t and just play.
Charlie Parker
#62. Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom.
Charlie Parker
#63. I kept thinking there's bound to be something else? I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it.
Charlie Parker
#65. 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
#66. It's just music. It's playing clean and looking for the pretty notes.
Charlie Parker
#67. I was a big 'Charlie Brown' fan as a kid.
Trey Parker
#69. You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.
Charlie Parker
#71. Any musician who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar. When I get too much to drink, I can't even finger well, let alone play decent ideas ... You can miss the most important years of your life, the years of possible creation.
Charlie Parker
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