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"I've played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I've been fortunate enough to play with them, a who's who. All of those guys, I've been fortunate enough to have performed with."
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"Jazz is not the format where I want to stay, but it really is a starting point for me."
"I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch."
"My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden."
Jazz,
"Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing."
Jazz,
"I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz."
Explore more quotes by Sonny Rollins
"I guess fortunate that I'm still around and I emphasize I guess because you never can tell what musicians would be playing had they been around as long as I have."
"I am a person who thinks about the music first in trying to achieve something musically valid."
"What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years."
"I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves."
"I miss playing with Miles. I did play with him a little while before he left the planet, but even at that time I longed to maybe do some things together."
"Many jazz artists go to L.A. seeking a more comfortable life and then they really stop playing."
"My mother came from St. Thomas. I heard that melody and all I did was actually adapt it. I made my adaptation of sort of an island traditional melody. It did become sort of my trademark tune."
"I don't want to appear hostile, like I'm hostile to L.A. or that I feel that the people don't appreciate jazz. I don't think it's that. I think it's something more. It's something a little bit more complicated than that."
"Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That's what classical music is, real European music."
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