Quotes About Jazz

Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.

Of course we've lost so many superstars who've made jazz what it is. We've lost so many musicians who created new things and changed the way we think about music and who took jazz to a new level. So jazz is suffering from that. But we still have a lot of incredible people playing jazz in the world. We have a lot of people leading the way.

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.

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.

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

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.

Jazz comes from a tradition where it swings. Swing was the main ingredient of jazz. And once it loses the swing...well, that's it.

I'm not a jazz singer, blues singer or country singer. I'm a singer that can sing rhythm & blues, that can sing jazz, that can sing country. There's a big difference. In other words, I'm not a specialist.

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'd actually been making my living as an organist with bands since I was probably 15 or 16 years old, and then as a senior in high school I put together a jazz quintet called The Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet.

Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

People who love jazz musicians love us when we play what we want to play and we're starving. But as soon as you commercialize your sound like Wes Montgomery did, the jazz fans and the critics are down on you!

If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.

When I start to think about all the things, I'm doing sometimes I just have to thank the man upstairs. Because I'm doing the morning show here in Chicago 5 days a week, and I have the syndicated radio show that's been going on now for several years. In addition we are in the midst of taping 13 episodes of a television show-The Legends of Jazz: The Masters of jazz on PBS-TV.

And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

The only reason is that I hadn't seen The Modern Jazz Quartet perform live and a live performance is often where the real experience of jazz takes place. I'm not familiar with the Boswell Sisters.

You basically have to play everything (in New Orleans), because you're getting calls to play gigs of all different styles, from classical to R&B to funk; modern jazz to traditional jazz.

I may be prejudiced, but I believe that jazz music has the strongest healing potential, and it's not just because I play it and love it so much. I feel that it's the improvisation in jazz that makes it so strong as a healing tool, what each individual gives to a tune from their heart and their soul when they take a solo. It's all spontaneous, and it's all love, and from the heart.

I think that a rap aficionado, the hardcore rap fan, will always go away from pop, in the same way a hardcore jazz fan will never think Kenny G is really a jazz artist. You gotta kind of know there's always going to be that purist who's going to be like if it ain't beats and rhymes, if there ain't a DJ, then that ain't Hip Hop.

The Democrat Party today is not enamored of Bill Clinton. They may not even be enamored of Hillary [Clinton]. But the things that jazzed Democrats back in the nineties are nowhere near the things that jazz the Democrats of today.

I've been dancing my entire life. Jazz, hip hop, ballet. And then there's tap dancing. I love to tap.

The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.

I feel that I have an obligation to jazz and also to myself to play as good as I can play.

When I started doing improvise music in Europe, in the beginning I thought the way that Europeans were interpreting the reconstruction of deconstruction of this thing that we call jazz - of course it's different than what Americans do, because Europeans have a different history, a different sensibility and so forth - the nature of the creative process itself it's the same; but what comes from that creative process is different, because you have a different history, you have a different society, different language.

I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem.

You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually.

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.

People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties.

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

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

[On Lisa Kudrow:] She's like the best kind of jazz there is. You don't know what note she's going to hit and it's always a surprise.

I'm always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott.

If you ever saw All That Jazz [1979], Bob Fosse was kind of raised dancing in strip joints and the whole era of burlesque, and that form ran his visual aesthetic, the pacing and rhythm of what he did.

Jazz to me is a living music.

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

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.

Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.

I just try to do as good job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and do that every night. Just see where it goes.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

In order to play jazz, you have to be able to play the blues.

In the last few years I've been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline.