Mike Stern to Fred Grand "Miles, no matter if he was rocking he was always swinging. I heard this thing on late-night TV last year from the Isle of Wight with Gary Bartz, Jack DeJohnette, Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea. Everything was really swinging. You could have taken the electronics out and put it on Kind Of Blue!"
Dave Stapleton to Nigel Jarrett "Jazz still has a problem with image. There's a stereotypical idea that its audience is composed mainly of older men with beards. Actually, a lot more young people are interested. But there's still this stigma."
Kyle Eastwood to Derek Ansell "I was always more interested in the process of making films rather than being a director. I do love films, and those are my two main interests, music and film." In his father's case, he says, it was the reverse. "Music was what he wanted to do before he got sidetracked by the acting."
Ingrid Laubrock to Dave Foxall "Three musicians I have been checking out a lot recently are Muhal Richards Abrams, Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill, members of the AACM who compose really well-designed music that still sounds very fresh to my ears, even on the older recordings. They all have an awe-inspiring output too and continue to search."
Steve Voce on the Lu Watters band "What an unmelodic, unswinging cacophony it made! I thought that the slam of the Lu Watters band was simply a nightmare of my childhood, but it's come back like some repeat tsunami of detritus to torment me again."
Peter Gamble at the Norwich Jazz Party "Enrico Tomasso also took the vocals, giving us the chance to hear an Englishman of Italian extraction singing in the style of a black American interpreting a French song, as he did on La Vie En Rose. It's the kind of thing you can only encounter at jazz parties."
Monty Alexander to Mark Gilbert on BluesFest "A lot of promoters these days are going for the most new and wonderful thing or musicians that don't necessarily connect to people who aren't big jazz fans. I appreciate that need but it's nice to have something that people in general can relate to, because to me jazz is still folk music."
Per Husby to Michael Tucker "For a long time, a basic criticism from Americans towards Europeans was that they 'didn't swing'. But this is dependent on whether you feel that the traditional idea of what 'swinging' is, is the only acceptable/available way within a jazz framework."
Alun Morgan on Graham Bond "When I was having a drink with Don , I remarked on Graham's power and excitement as an alto player. Don replied "Actually I don’t think it's my band any more. I'm in danger of Graham taking over!"
Nick Duckett on the genealogy of the vamp "Alberto Socarras's 1935 recording of Masabi features an extended final montuno or vamp played over a two-bar bass pattern - something that is typical of Cuban music but was alien to American jazz before its adoption by the Cubop movement in the 40s. This vamping over a groove was carried over through jazz into 1960s rock. Deep Purple fans might be surprised to find a motif very similar to Smoke On The Water in Baia, the Brazilian best seller from the 1940s."
John Robert Brown reviewing Horace Parlan's biography "In 1971 Parlan was mugged in Manhattan. The following day he witnessed an armed robbery. 'You can't create good music in an atmosphere full of tension with drugs and crime on the streets,' he writes. Horace Parlan left New York to settle in Denmark."
Illinois Jacquet to Anthony Troon on European rhythm sections "They don't feel the music by instinct. They don't have a heritage of jazz. They learn it at second-hand. But me – I first saw Slam Stewart playing with Art Tatum . . . and it was like watching a Broadway play."
Mike Stern to Fred Grand