54 Bebop Quotes

Following is our list of the most famous bebop quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational bebop quotes. Hopefully, these bebop quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your bebop knowledge!

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Famous Bebop Quotes

Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but they weren't sweet. — Miles Davis

I still prefer the bebop of the '40s. The very stuff I started out with is still the best to me. I have come full circle. — Carla Bley

What makes bebop legitimate is the fact that when it was done, it was illegitimate. — Matthew Shipp

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz. — Gunther Schuller

[On bebop years] All I did was sing 'How High the Moon.' It seemed like the only song I ever sang. — Ella Fitzgerald

Jazz is about being in the moment. — Herbie Hancock

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance. - Francoise Sagan

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance. — Francoise Sagan

Jazz is freedom. You think about that. - Thelonious Monk

Jazz is freedom. You think about that. — Thelonious Monk

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz. — Dave Van Ronk

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm. — Jelly Roll Morton

Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.' — Wayne Shorter

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now. — Pat Martino

Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently. — Thelonious Monk

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. — Duke Ellington

Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise... but a way of life. — Lester Bowie

Short Bebop Quotes

  • [Bebop is] Chinese music. — Louis Armstrong
  • Bebop is the music of the future (as soon as they learn how to play it). — Dexter Gordon
  • Musically, the bebop route was magnificent, but businesswise, it was the dumbest thing I ever did. — Woody Herman
  • Bebop has set music back twenty years. — Tommy Dorsey
  • Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me. — Albert Ayler
  • Man always thinks about the past before he dies. — Jet Black
  • Oh yeah, that was the thing to do at that time. This was before the new wave of bebop started. — Martin Denny
  • We may play in a contemporary rock vein, use standard bebop themes, and many other things besides. — Chuck Mangione

Bebop Image Quotes

People Writing About Bebop

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Thelonious Monk

Thelonious Monk
quotes on love, religion and leadership

48 1185
Read quotes by Miles Davis

Miles Davis
quotes on silence, jazz and life

171 1757
Read quotes by Carla Bley

Carla Bley
quotes on life, love and music

18 161
Read quotes by Gunther Schuller

Gunther Schuller
quotes on music, art and education

15 85
Read quotes by Ella Fitzgerald

Ella Fitzgerald
quotes on music, flappers and love

31 1421
Read quotes by Herbie Hancock

Herbie Hancock

97 499

More Bebop Quotes

I went through the whole number, you know. The swing era, the boogie woogie era, the bebop era. Thelonious Monk is still one of my favorites. So a lot of these people had their effect on me. — Mose Allison

I was reading Omar Khayyam, Kahlil Gibran, Rumi, L. Ron Hubbard, all sorts of philosophy. Bebop cats are like that. Curious. I wanted to know about everything. — Quincy Jones

You don't see the European classical musicians allowing the music of Bach, Brahms, or Beethoven to become extinct. That music has gone on for centuries and centuries. We have the same obligation. Why do we have to become so 'hip' that we can say, 'Bebop is square,' or "New Orleans is square'? This, to me, is a shame. — Rahsaan Roland Kirk

Everything has a beginning and an end. Life is just a cycle of starts and stops. There are ends we don't desire, but they're inevitable, we have to face them. It's what being human is all about. — Jet Black

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts. — Jim Jarmusch

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. — Horace Silver

Man always thinks about the past before he dies, as if he were frantically searching for proof that he truly lived. — Jet Black

My first love in music was jazz, but I like it all," "I reacted emotionally to Art Blakey and, of course, to Joe Pass and Wes Montgomery. I was all of 16 when I had my first guitar lesson with Joe. But I never focused on being a bebop player. I loved the harmony, rhythm and phrasing, but I wanted to apply them to my own concept and sound. — Larry Carlton

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop. — Donald Byrd

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I've heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn't swinging. — Jay McShann

Nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era from the '20's or bebop from the Swing Era or Avant-garde from Bebop, or Effusion, or on and on and on. So, we don't really know where it's going. — Gary Giddins

In those days before hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy, and before learning of the so-called bebop era--by the way, I have some thoughts about that word, "bebop"--my first jazz hero ever, jazz improvisor hero, was Lester Young. I was a big "Lester Young-oholic," and all of my buddies were Lester Young-oholics. We'd get together and dissect, analyze, discuss, and listen to Lester Young's solos for hours and hours and hours. He was our god. — J. J. Johnson

Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens. — Walker Evans

All the forms of popular music from jazz to hip-hop, to bebop, to soul [come from black innovation]. You talk about different dances from the catwalk, to the jitterbug, to the Charleston, to break dancing -\-\ all these are forms of black dancing...What would [life] be without a song, without a dance, and joy and laughter, and music. — Michael Jackson

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s. — Robert Wyatt

I have pretty ecumenical tastes. I'm interested in a lot of different kinds of music, so I don't listen with a jaundiced ear to music because it's in a certain category, whether it's country or opera or hip-hop or bebop or whatever it is. — David Sanborn

From folk to tribal to Cab Calloway, Cole Porter, Gershwin to the Rolling Stones, whose first record was all covers, to country-western, bebop, blues, and even the referencing in classic hip hop to cliched love ballads of the '80s or whatever - that is kinda gone, and that's just terrifying to me. — Cat Power

Basically my influences have been American influences. It's been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music. It's like making a stew. You put all these various ingredients in it. You season it with this. You put that in it. You put the other in it. You mix it all up and it comes out something neat, something that you created. — Horace Silver

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