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.
I wish - I wish instead of just recommending these books, I could set them down at your doorstep. The collected stories of John Updike, the second volume of T.C. Boyle's collected stories, and Stanley Crouch's book about the rise and times of our genius saxophone player Charlie Parker. These are deep books, books that you can get lost in.
I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.
I grew up listening to Ravel, Debussy, Bartok and jazz like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. It was incredibly inspiring! And I was given a guitar and I said 'What the hell is this?!'
As a very small girl, I listened to Charlie Parker and loved him and Max Roach and people like that.
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.
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.
I wish I could've been friends with Charlie Parker and played with him. That's my period. I feel real close to the '40s - and actually, I was born in '37, so I was a kid singing on the radio in the '40s. But I always dreamed of going to big cities.
I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'
I didn't know what the hell Charlie Parker was playing... I just liked the way he played.
