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
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.
Alan Cheuse
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.
Alissa Quart
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?!'
Allan Holdsworth
As a very small girl, I listened to Charlie Parker and loved him and Max Roach and people like that.
Aretha Franklin
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
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
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
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.
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.
Charlie Haden
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.
Charlie Watts
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
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
Mozart was born Mozart. Charlie Parker was born Charlie Parker.
Damien Chazelle
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
'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
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
I knew Charlie Parker, and he gave us such a gift with his music. He put so much into so little space, and it was tragic that he died so young.
Harry Belafonte
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
Are we, as humans, gaining any insight on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context. So I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster.
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.
I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.
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.
When it's all said and done, jazz with a capital J is where I'm coming from. Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk - that's what I really studied when I was a teenager and what really fueled my passion.
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.
Charlie Parker is my greatest inspiration as a saxophone player - anything that involves him entails a large amount of respect.
I grew up listening to Puerto Rican music like everybody else. But when I listened to Charlie Parker for the first time, I said, 'How does this guy play so fast?'
You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.
Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.
The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.
