Quotes About Jazz

Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.

I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced 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.

I used to hang out a lot in jazz clubs, and the groups took to a kid like me who wasn't afraid to get up and sing with a jazz band. Then I started to hang out in rock clubs and learned to carry off different styles.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

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.

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 have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.

Comedy is a funny thing, and it's really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title. You would never go to a club just to see "Live music," you would go to a jazz club to see jazz, a blues club to see blues, etc. But when you go to see "standup comedy," if you don't know the performers material, you really don't have any idea what you're gonna get.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

At Carnegie Hall the Preservation Hall Jazz Band showed how easily it could hop from era to era. It could work like a rhythm-and-blues horn section or a tightly arranged little big band if need be, but it could also switch back into the polyphonic glories of vintage New Orleans jazz, in which nearly every instrument seems to improvise around the tune at the same time.

Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.

In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

If you're making money people don't think you're playing Jazz. When you're not making money they think you're a great Jazz musician.

Music was not a big deal to me when I was in middle school. And then I slowly became a big jazz fan. Even more than concerts, a lot of my high school time was spent going to jazz clubs in the city.

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.

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

Personally, I think young musicians need to learn to play more than one style. Jazz can only enhance the classical side, and classical can only enhance the jazz. I started out playing classical, because you have to have that as a foundation.

What has been America's most nurturing contribution to the culture of this planet so far? Many would say jazz. I, who love jazz, will say this instead: Alcoholics Anonymous.

One of the most obvious aspects of the music to people who know jazz is: How does it feel in the swing? These are things that are very subtle and that jazz musician appreciate in a particular way. I appreciate the way Tommy Flanagan swings, the way that Barry Harris swings, the great pulse that Hank Jones and Bill Evans have - end every one of them is different.

Angelo is a brilliant jazz talent. His receptivity, seriousness, his ability to execute ideas simple or complex, combined with his love and feel for the substance of jazz reveal why he is an exceptional artist.

From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.

I was raised on piano and saxophone and jazz music for ten or twelve years. Before I even picked up a bass. My whole family has always pushed the arts, you know? My brother is a doctor of music and my cousin is an opera singer over in Austria. Arts were always a big thing in our family.

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

A lot of EDM is not bad at all when it's simple, but a lot of it is not really musical. That's just what I really like to do: taking what I had at the beginning, which is classical and jazz influences, and putting it into electro.

So from Jazz, Blues, R&B, Soul, Classical and Country music, Hip Hop has introduced us to a little bit of everything.

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.

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

Understanding is the least important thing when it comes to digging jazzbecause, like anything else, jazz is a form of entertainment. It is created to be enjoyed, not understood like you read a blueprint.

Many of the jazz musicians whom are no longer here. You don't realize that it's history when it is happening and then time passes and you look at a picture and you say "Wow, there is history attached to that."

The history of all big jazz bands shows was, first they played for dancing, and then they played for singing.

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats.

I think if it wasn't for the blues, there wouldn't be no jazz.

Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.

I knew what real instruments I wanted and, in some cases, who I wanted to play them. I had started listening to a lot of ambient music and jazz and I wanted to incorporate stuff like that, too.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.

I write pop songs. But I think it is sprinkled with a lot of counter-culture references. It ranged from rap to hip hop to trip hop, house, drum and bass, and experimental and improv and jazz.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

Don't believe that jazz about there's nothing you can do, "turn on and drop out, man" - because you've got to turn on and drop in, or they're going to drop all over you.

I'm a jazz guy and a Bruce Springsteen guy. So I wanted something more current, and edgier, and angrier. So I asked my kid to educate me about hip hop; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of it. And he did so. I found it to be much richer than I would've thought. I think some of the poetry in it is really spectacular. I threw rap into the book. I think I mentioned Kendrick Lamar. I'm really into Tupac these days. I love Nas, N.W.A.

Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'

The law don't like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.