(...) "I studied Bird's creative vein with the same passion and understanding with which i'd studied the scores of my favourite classical composers, because i found a purity in his music that until then i had found only in classical music. Bird was the cause of my realization that jazz improvisation, as well as jazz composition, is the equal of classical music if the performer is a creative person. Bird brought melodic development to a new point in jazz, as far as Bartok or Schoenberg or Hindemith had taken it in the classics. But he also brought to music a primitive, mystic, supra-mind communication that i 'd only heard in the late Beethoven quartets and, even more, in Stravinsky. Looking backward, i realised that this kind of communication has been there in other jazz creators' improvisation, for instance Rex Stewart's trumpet. Bartok and most other composers knew about life up to death and wrote music as though it and they only existed here. But Bird had an un-afraid sureness of self and to the relation of self to life, and death, and creation. His music exists here and beyond-as though he had been playing before he got here." (...)
Από τα liner notes του album Mingus Dynasty
