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"I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician."
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"Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing."
"One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?"
Jazz,
"My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden."
Jazz,
"I stayed with them for about a year up there and, at night, worked over in Long Island at a club called The High Hat Club which was like a pseudo jazz / blues place."
"My roots and Victor's are jazz, basically, but these two young fellows that we have with us come out of rock bands. And they're tremendously exciting players."
Jazz,
Explore more quotes by Dave Van Ronk
"Ian and Sylvia, who, when you got right down to it, were essentially country and western singers. I just recorded his Four Strong Winds. It's a wonderful song."
"In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that."
"If I do a piece in my living room, if I practice it - and I have the tapes to prove this - it's not going to be as good as doing the same piece in front of an audience."
"There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians."
"They basically said that if I didn't show up for school they'd mark me present, they wouldn't send the truant officer after me. At 16 I enrolled in something called continuing education. Once a month I'd go out to Jamaica, but I didn't take it seriously."
"Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time."
"If there was ever any truth to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it I've ever seen was in that period of 1960 to 1965. All of sudden they were handing out major label recording contracts like they were coming in Cracker Jack boxes."
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