The Clef Notes Jazz Festival

Charlie Parker

"Don't play the saxophone. Let it play you."

"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

"I kept thinking there's bound to be something else…. I could hear it sometimes, but I couldn't play it."

"Bird's mind and fingers work with incredible speed. He can imply four chord changes in a melodic pattern where another musician would have trouble inserting two."
-- Leonard Feather

"Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker."
-- Miles Davis summarizing the history of jazz 

"The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes."
-- John Coltrane

"He had just what we needed. He had the line and he had the rhythm. The way he got from one note to the other and the way he played the rhythm fit what we were trying to do perfectly. We heard him and knew the music had to go his way…. He was the other half of my heartbeat."
-- Dizzy Gillespie

This is a 6-day festival with the best alto saxophone players in the world.