"I used to say it sounds to me like he and Coltrane would climb up the inside of the chords, rip them apart and restructure them and they were doing it in such different ways, it was much less of a machine and more approachable for me. It makes it that much harder to pin-point how he did it. But there was a really interesting mix of styles at the time."
"Like if you look at some of these kids now and their influences, they're never going to sound like he did even if they come from where he came from. What you have on the radio, what you can get from a computer, what you have on the Internet, what's popular at the time. You're not learning music from the one record you have in your house or that's being played on the radio."
"The Bridge, that album, reshaping the harmonic structure, part of the reshaping of the harmonic structure. So, for him, he got to rewrite all these things. Think about who you're talking about. You're talking about the guy who hung out with Bird and Miles and Coltrane."
"I think it's fair to say that nobody plays the way he does either, you know what I mean? When he puts that stamp on it, it makes it his version of that standard which to me makes it a valid reason to do it. You're not regurgitating it, you're putting your stamp on it. Imagine being given a topic to write about and everybody's written about it, it's been humped to death, but here's what I have to say about it. I've been researching the hell out of it and I have a different take. Add something to the lexicon."
"What haven't we hit on? Monk and Coltrane. Have you heard the Carnegie Hall one? I like the live one better, because I think, and I may be wrong about this, I could hear Coltrane getting frustrated. There?s a maniac next to him: grunting, hairy maniac, playing piano, probably dosed on something...or not...genius either way...I'm a big fan of Monk with people, especially the Monk and Mulligan, one of my favorite albums of all time because those two were built for each other. Gerry's so in-the-box, Monk is so out-of-the-box, put them together but they're both very gentle. Gerry played really, really intelligently with reasonably advanced chord changes in weird keys. And all of Monk's stuff was really advanced and weird keys."
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