Alexis Korner Quotes

• When I reflect on how things have changed, I can’t help but laugh.

  Alexis Korner

• The parallel development in American blues to the British movement has resulted in Johnny Winters.

  Alexis Korner

• The British feel of blues has been hard, rather than emotional. Far too much emphasis on 12 bar, too little attention to words, far too little originality.

  Alexis Korner

• Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music.

  Alexis Korner

• Once you became associated with a children’s show, you’re finished.

  Alexis Korner

• In those days, between the ages of 12 and 18 you meant nothing. You were the extra place at the side table if someone came to dinner. You were of no interest to anyone.

  Alexis Korner

• In 1940 I came across a record by Jimmy Yancey. I can’t say how important that record is. From then on, all I wanted to do was play the blues.

  Alexis Korner

• If the same phrase in the same place created the right effect, I was perfectly prepared to use it every time. I wasn’t worried that I wasn’t improvising.

  Alexis Korner

• I’m a compulsive musician, but it’s also a bloody good way out of having to do anything else.

  Alexis Korner

• I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

  Alexis Korner

• I wanted to be able to play guitar. I wanted to be able to make music hurt.

  Alexis Korner

• I must have been heavily schizophrenic all my life. The me who hears what the other me can’t play is the dominant one.

  Alexis Korner

• I had always intended to make a living out of playing blues. But I never admitted it to myself. I don’t suppose I could have given a logical reason for it ever becoming possible to do so.

  Alexis Korner

• I guess music, particularly the blues, is the only form of schizophrenia that has organised itself into being both legal and beneficial to society.

  Alexis Korner

• I can’t explain why one wants to pass a particular sort of pain onto other people, but you do.

  Alexis Korner

• Every musical movement that is big enough has to produce some good musicians who wouldn’t have had the incentive to start playing without it.

  Alexis Korner

• Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

  Alexis Korner

Alexis Korner (17)

Birth:	19th April, 1928
Death:	1st January, 1984
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Broadcaster, Historian, Lyricist, Musician

About

Alexis Korner was a British blues musician and radio broadcaster, who has sometimes been referred to as "a founding father of British blues". He spent his childhood in France, Switzerland and North Africa and arrived in London in 1940 at the start of World War II. After the war, Korner played piano and guitar and in 1949 joined Chris Barber's Jazz Band where he met blues harmonica player Cyril Davies. Korner made his first official record on Decca Records DFE 6286 in the company of Ken Colyer's Skiffle Group.  Korner brought many American blues artists, previously virtually unknown in Britain, to perform.

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Today's Anniversary - 15th January

Births

• 1809 - Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
• 1971 - Regina King
• 1842 - Mary MacKillop
• 1850 - Sofia Kovalevskaya
• 1914 - Etty Hillesum

Deaths

• 1993 - Sammy Cahn
• 1948 - Josephus Daniels
• 1955 - Yves Tanguy
• 2005 - Ruth Warrick
• 1983 - Meyer Lansky