A Quote by Miguel Zenon
I grew up listening to Puerto Rican music like everybody else. But when I listened to Charlie Parker for the first time, I said, 'How does this guy play so fast?'
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[Charlie "Bird" Parker] would sit down and ask [Phil Wood], "What do you think about this whole secondary Viennese school with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern? Are you listening to that music and what do you feel about it?" These were the conversations that he was having. And he also said, what he learned from Charlie Parker was, not that he studied with him in the formal sense, is that the first thing that Charlie Parker would always ask was, "Did you eat today?".
I grew up listening to Ravel, Debussy, Bartok and jazz like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. It was incredibly inspiring! And I was given a guitar and I said 'What the hell is this?!'
I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'
It's amazing to be a Puerto Rican fighter, we have a great history of fighters. I say this all the time, 'I'm Puerto Rican, raised in Philadelphia so I got the best of both worlds. I got the Puerto Rican power and the Philly toughness. It comes a long way.
I grew up in a house where we danced all the time because we're Puerto Rican.
I don't think it's fair that you can say I'm not a Puerto Rican fighter because I wasn't born in Puerto Rico, when my blood is Puerto Rican.
Being a Puerto Rican artist, I support all kinds of projects that are developed on my beautiful island that in some way or another put our Puerto Rican flag up.
The Puerto Rican fans have supported me and it means a lot. I'm a Puerto Rican just like they are.
I've been dealing with racism since I was a little kid! My dad's super black, from Puerto Rico. Then my mom's super white - she's Puerto Rican too, but she grew up in Milwaukee. As a Latino in the U.S. I've seen how we are treated differently based on the color of our skin.
The farther away you writers stay, the better I like it. You know why? Because you're trying to create a bad image of me... you do it because I'm black and Puerto Rican, but I'm proud to be Puerto Rican.
Sometimes you think "Okay, well I'm going to play my horn, and I'm going to study Charlie "Bird" Parker solos or [John Coltrain] or whatever." But as [Phil Wood] said to me, "Man, Bird listened to everything."
I am a Puerto Rican. I could have been born on the moon, but I'm still Puerto Rican.
The Beatles were huge. And the first thing they said when you interviewed them, 'Oh yeah, we grew up on Motown.'..They were the first white act to admit they grew up listening to black music.
I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.
I grew up dancing salsa - you know, a traditional Puerto Rican dance.
The Documents Project has actively collected documentation on both island-based Puerto Rican art as well as Nuyorican art in the United States through partnerships and researchers ceded at the University of Puerto Rico's museum in San Juan and Hunter College's Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York City, respectively.
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