Quotes About Jazz

My school music teacher, Al Bennest, introduced me to jazz by playing Louis Armstrong's record of "West End Blues" for me. I found more jazz on the radio, and began looking for records. My paper route money, and later, money I earned working after school in a print shop and a butcher shop went toward buying jazz records. I taught myself the alto saxophone and the drums in order to play in my high school dance band.

I was very adamant about not being called a jazz singer, but now I've embraced it. The way I approach music is through jazz, so I'm a jazz singer.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.

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.

You can't teach it [jazz singing]. There's nobody who can teach you how to sing jazz. Either you know how to sing jazz, or you don't.

The cool thing is that jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit. Because in jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best, we're non-judgmental.

I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

A lot of people in the jazz community are looking at how much notoriety we're getting. And we're an inspiration to a lot of young people, because now there's something new they can aim for that's in their grasp. Because a lot of times when you attend a jazz college it's all about the history, none of the teachers there are forward-thinking, for the most part, so they don't teach you how to be yourself and embrace the music around you.

We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.

In those days before hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy, and before learning of the so-called bebop era--by the way, I have some thoughts about that word, "bebop"--my first jazz hero ever, jazz improvisor hero, was Lester Young. I was a big "Lester Young-oholic," and all of my buddies were Lester Young-oholics. We'd get together and dissect, analyze, discuss, and listen to Lester Young's solos for hours and hours and hours. He was our god.

This is a tradition of resistance to the term that's as old as the term itself, especially because that term has been used to commodify and reduce black creativity, and also to appropriate and sell it. That's what John Coltrane said in an interview with a Japanese journalist: "Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist." And he's treated as one of the central figures in the history of jazz. So if he rejected it, then why is it weird when I do it? I'm in the tradition!

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

Jazz is a big thing with me. It's a very big passion of mine, to play it. I'm an amateur musician and I love everything about it. I was obsessed with jazz when I was 15 years old and I know a lot about it because I've loved it so much.

Jazz is capable of doing much more than depicting the dope fiend and the drunk and the slinky gal. In our show there are many very funny sequences where we were able to use jazz as it can be used-in a happy way.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.

Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record.

As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all.

It's not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones

I have a theory that musicians recognize each other and if they are destined to collaborate together they will. Mainly, they recognize each other according to the class they belong to. If they are punk-rocker kids from the neighborhood, they are going form a band. If they happen to be musicians that are going to play in pubs and restaurants, they are going to recognize each other, form a band and play together. If it's about musicians that are playing jazz and are going to jazz festivals, for e.g., then they are going to meet and work together.

I'm a jazz musician by education and vocation, but I don't think jazz should [ dictate] what I want to do.

Business today is all about improvisation, which is the essence of jazz. Perhaps in the past we could just follow the operating manual and do what we were told, but today the world is too complex and fast. Today it's all about real-time innovation and creativity. Individuals may get hired based on their resumes, but they'll get promoted and reach their dreams based on their ability to create. In that context, being a jazz musician was the best MBA I could have ever received.

I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and am a product of a family that were jazz aficionados and also very interested in progressive politics. And so I had a lot of artists and musicians in my home. Lots of Latin music, folk, and jazz and blues, bluegrass-type of stuff. Painters and stuff like that.

I hired Bob at Terrytoons. He was my assistant animator, and then became an animator himself. He had just come from Boston with his family and was a brilliant draftsman as well as a great jazz guitarist. We had lots of fun nights in Greenwich Village together and then later hanging in LA. Bob worked on Fritz the Cat , Heavy Traffic , Coonskin , and on Wizards . I am terribly saddened by his passing and will miss him dearly.

I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school.

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

I like the idea of an eclectic approach, incorporating jazz with other forms and other genres of music.

The wonderful thing about Jazz is its willingness to take chances.

I was interested in Armstrong to begin with because he is the most important figure in Jazz in the 20th Century. There's simply no question about it. I mean, if you're going to compare him to somebody, it's Shakespeare in terms of centrality of the tradition, in being at the beginning of it.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

Visually I've always liked the 20s 30s for film. I do these because I like the music. I like the clothes. I like the way the women and the guys look. There are soldiers and sailors and gangsters with the machine guns in their violin cases. It's a very colorful era of New York, full of great theater and great nightclubs and great jazz.

I would also like to mention pianists like Michel Petrucciani or Chick Сorea for whom I have great admiration in the jazz field.

I play in a jazz sextet. So I don't have time to do a lot of conventions. The good thing is, when I do them, it does puts me back in touch with the people who go to movies. I do these shows just to stay in touch with them.

I was 16 when I came to New York. I had graduated to a tenor banjo in the school jazz band, and it was kind of boring - just chords, chords, chords. Then my father took me to a mountain music and dance festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and there I saw relatively uneducated people playing great music by ear.

I love pop music. It's not easy to write a good pop song. It may be easier to put out a fake jazz album, as Sting does from time to time.

There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.

D.C. is a great place. The music, jazz, has always been great here, the restaurants have always been fantastic here. And there's been a lot of changes in this city over the last 30 years, and all for the better.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.

Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.

Jazz has the ability to absorb & transform influences from diverse musical styles.