[Bebop is] Chinese music.

Bebop has set music back twenty years.

Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me.

I came through the bebop era, and to me that was enough.

Bebop is the music of the future (as soon as they learn how to play it).

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

Oh yeah, that was the thing to do at that time. This was before the new wave of bebop started.

Musically, the bebop route was magnificent, but businesswise, it was the dumbest thing I ever did.

We may play in a contemporary rock vein, use standard bebop themes, and many other things besides.

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

If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about.

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

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

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.

The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, 'Bird,' was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood's potential as a filmmaker.

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

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.

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.

When creating 'Cowboy Bebop,' I thought it would be more interesting if I added different types of elements together to create something that was completely new.

I wanted to have lots of characters in 'Bebop' without white skin, and if people weren't used to that, well, maybe it would even make them think a little bit about it.

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.

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.

Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn't even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that's been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.

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.

I grew up in Shanghai 'til I was 10 or 11, with one year in Tibet. When I was 5 or 6 years old, the American radio station came to Shanghai, and I used to love bebop and jazz, but I didn't know where it came from.

I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.

I really enjoy listening to players on the cusp of swing into bebop like Charlie Shavers, Clifford Brown and Clark Terry. They balance immense facility on their instrument with rhythm, melody, and more complex harmonies of the time.

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.

There was a lot of freedom, so bands in those days did not have to play for the public. They played for club owners that enjoyed music. You know, what happened - there was a lot of clubs that had bebop music or different forms of music. It was great for musicians.

I've always thought that jazz needs to be heard by a wider audience in Puerto Rico. I want to put together a series of free concerts in the small towns - one with Miles Davis music, another with bebop, maybe Duke Ellington. I want younger people to see what is possible.

Musically, swing pretty much dominated in the '30s. And into the late '30s, swing is beginning to change over to bebop in the early '40s, which is exactly when this new science of theoretical physics, particularly theoretical atomic physics, was really coming to the fore.

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.

As far as actors who pop up again and again in Japanese dubs, and because they're really good actors, people like Steve Bloom, not only in 'Cowboy Bebop,' but also he's sort of the de-facto Wolverine. If you're doing an animated Wolverine anything, Marvel usually just goes to Steve first because he's recognized as that voice.

Truth of the matter is, jazz is American music. And that doesn't mean bebop. Jazz is really about improvising. All the music that's been created in America has been pretty much improvised... Whether it's hillbilly or rock n' roll for blues, it's basically jazz music... It's basically about another way of hearing what comes out of America.

I love so many different types of music - hard rock, bebop, jazz fusion, R&B. And I've loved meeting and painting so many amazing artists like Lionel Richie, Ronnie Wood, Sia, Steven Tyler, Swizz Beatz, Taylor Swift, James Moody, The Fifth Dimension, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Michael Jackson. It makes me smile thinking about each one of them.

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.

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.

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