Quotes About Jazz

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

I visited New York in '63, intending to move there, but I noticed that what I valued about jazz was being discarded. I ran into `out-to-lunch' free jazz, and the notion that groove was old-fashioned. All around the United States, I could see jazz becoming linear, a horn-player's world. It made me realize that we were not jazz musicians; we were territory musicians in love with all forms of African-American music. All of the musicians I loved were territory musicians, deeply into blues and gospel as well as jazz.

In New York, I was excited about the music in New York because the only music that I was more or less involved with in the South was either country and western or hillbilly music as we used to call it when I was a kid and, ah, gospel. There was no, there was no in between. And when I got to New York all the other musics that's in the world just came into my head whether it was the classics, jazz, I never knew what jazz was about all, had heard anything about jazz.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.

The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it's quite palpable but not visible. It's always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity.

I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.

If I knew what it was going to look like, I wouldnt be so excited to be a part of it. Jazz is a music of surprise; its a music of spontaneity. I think jazz musicians live--I know I do--for being surprised and not knowing whats going to come next.

Keith Moon is not interested in Jazz and won't ever be a Jazz drummer because he's more interested in looking good and being screamed at.

I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.

Through the dark days of legalized segregation and on into the civil rights era, jazz shone as a beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding. It seemed as if the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color.

I find that jazz loosens up the deep place of my mind, lets me find my own strange rhythms. Generally, I find the knottier the jazz, the better. Anything with singing is a distraction. Listening to classical music tends to have the unconscious effect of making my writing too smooth.

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.

I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock-n-roll with jazz, and I thought I could make some money playing music.

Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.

To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!

There are a million examples of not feeling the jazz, but using the jazz.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

'Jazz Artist of the Century' would have to be a distinctive soloist and ensemble player, a composer, an arranger, a bandleader, and a driver; would have to span all the genres and periods of jazz; would have to have run her own label; [would] possess a deep spirituality, with grace and a sense of humor; and would have to have succeeded against all odds. Who else? Mary Lou Williams.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

Jazz is musical humor. The noun jazz describes a modern American technique for the playing of any music, accompanied by noise called harmony, and interpolated instrumental effects. It also describes music exhibiting influence of that technique which has as its traditional object to secure the effects of surprise, or in the broadest sense, humor.

Even my colleagues don't read classic criticism. And my feeling is that if you don't do that then you're not really practicing your craft. That's how you learn how to do it. You don't learn how to write about jazz just from listening to jazz. You learn how to write by reading the great writers and how they worked, the great music critics.

Fitzgerald coined the phrase the 'Jazz Age,' and now we're living in the Hip-Hop Age.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

My first Grammy wasn't even in a jazz category, but of course I was really excited. 'Rockit' was the beginning of kind of a new era for the whole hip-hop movement.

I have been influenced by the greatest artists in jazz, pop, reggae, traditional, ballards, pop, and all types of music, taking the best from each to represent my own personality. Whitney Houston, George Michaels, Sade, Phil Collins, and many others have influenced me.

I like rock music. I like jazz better, though.

Jazz is so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone to all of these.

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.

It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide our attention when we're listening, and how we can refine what we're doing musically. Also how we can create our own music, and what opportunities that can bring us, as creative musicians. And then insisting that musicians put themselves through an intellectually rigorous process, which involves a lot of reading and writing, while insisting that music scholars think about ethics.

A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?

I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.

Sweets [Edison] can say more with one note than any other Jazz player alive... an approach that stresses simplicity, glorious tone, natural potency and an unmatched affinity. He is a unique stylist in our music.

Whenever there's a change with Jazz & its aesthetics, it's almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

I was pretty much prepared because I was already playing in extremely good ways when I arrived from Europe because I played jazz four or five years before I arrived here.

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

I love music. My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented !

There's the tradition in jazz of having the “Battle of the Bands” and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.

I think jazz and comic books are probably the two uniquely American art forms.

[Jazz singing] is like pornography. You can't say what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Pain can be washed out with a song. / Pain can become jazz digested and transformed.

I understand that there are forms of entertainment that can make people weep or jazz them up so they feel like they have had an experience. But I also know that an hour later that's faded and you are back to the difficult realities of your own life. And we need to help people know how to go beyond those difficulties to a place where God dwells.

The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.