Rahsaan Roland Kirk famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Squares #New Orleans #Bebop
When I die, I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it.
-- Rahsaan Roland Kirk

#Beautiful #Crazy #Play
All it is, is a tone. So I'm gonna come back as a note!
-- Rahsaan Roland Kirk

#Tone #Notes
Keep searchinâ€™ for your mystery note on the universal piano of life.
-- Rahsaan Roland Kirk

#Piano #Mystery #Notes
What about a blues in W, in the key of W.
-- Rahsaan Roland Kirk

#Music #Keys #Jazz
I didn't ask my mother to buy me a trumpet or a violin, I started right on the water hose.
-- Rahsaan Roland Kirk

#Mother #Water #Violin
We are all driven by an invisible whip. Some run, some have fun, some are hip, some tip, some dip, but we all must answer to the invisible whip.
-- Rahsaan Roland Kirk

#Running #Fun #Answers
Keep searchin’ for your mystery note on the universal piano of life.
-- Rahsaan Roland Kirk

#Piano #Mystery #Notes
I wish we could just stay on the bandstand, it's so peaceful up here.
-- Rahsaan Roland Kirk

#Peaceful #Wish

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!
Justice to others and to ourselves is the same; that we cannot define our duties by mathematical lines ruled by the square, but must fill with them the great circle traced by the compasses
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.
Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area. And bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today. So I'm asking Congress, please investigate this now. Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot.
In America, there might be better gastronomic destinations than New Orleans, but there is no place more uniquely wonderful. ... With the best restaurants in New York, you'll find something similar to it in Paris or Copenhagen or Chicago. But there is no place like New Orleans. So it's a must-see city because there's no explaining it, no describing it. You can't compare it to anything. So, far and away New Orleans.
There is no other place on earth even remotely like New Orleans. Don't even try to compare it to anywhere else.
Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.
I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.
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.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk famous quotes

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