Quotes About Jazz

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. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.

I have to admit that more and more lately, the whole idea of jazz as an idiom is one that I've completely rejected. I just don't see it as an idiomatic thing any more...To me, if jazz is anything, it's a process, and maybe a verb, but it's not a thing. It's a form that demands that you bring to it things athat are valuable to you, that are personal to you. That, for me, is a pretty serious distinction that doesn't have anything to do with blues, or swing, or any of these other things that tend to be listed as essentials in order for music to be jazz with a capital J.

The job of the jazz people is to take it as far as it will go and that's what they're doing. But in the process of taking it out there, there has to be some times when they're not getting it right. It all depends on what you dig. I personally don't think the fusion of jazz with the heaviness of rock is working.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

There was a time, from 1935-1946, when teenagers and young adults danced to jazz-orientated bands. When jazz orchestras dominated pop charts and when influential clarinettists were household names. This was the swing era.

The hardest thing about being a young musician on the jazz scene is that there are so many styles of music, jazz and otherwise, that you're exposed to. The challenge is to use all that in your own way, to personalize all that has come before you and all that is happening around you. To get the music the way you want it, there's a lot of work involved.

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.

A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He's above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.

Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it's not a fad. It's up to us to see to it that it stays alive.

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.

In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

The French - they like jazz, theyve been on jazz a long time.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

I'd much prefer to hear somebody like Ed Thigpen [drummer with New York session group Stuff, and featured on innumerable hits] take a solo. I mean, that's what it is. I'd much rather hear that than the jazz/rock thing because it's blowing an aspect of jazz that I really like...the level where you can snap your fingers to it and you can groove to it. You can do anything to it.

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

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.

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.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

Justin Di Cioccio led a jazz program at Music and Art, but there was no jazz in Performing Arts. After they joined, it became Laguardia School of Arts.

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.

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.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

I became a jazz fan quite early and never went off the path thereafter.

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.

You know, somebody mentioned that I was sort of a jazz-pop singer. And I'm thrilled that somebody would find that, at last, in my presentation, because it's such a part of where I live.

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

I learned jazz; that comes from blues. I learned rock; that comes from blues. I learned pop; that comes from blues. Even dance, that comes from blues, with the answer-and-response.

People always ask, "Why jazz?" and I'm like "Why not?" It's kind of like asking Seurat, "Why so many dots?" I imagine if you asked Bjork, "Why the Tibetan bells?" She'd probably be like "That's just what I heard." It's the same thing. This is just the way I see music.

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.

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

I used to be a jazz snob, believe it or not. I sort of turned my nose up at anything more commercial.

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.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

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.

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.

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 love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

If you play jazz, then you play with your fingers. If you're playing rock, you use a pick. There's really no rhyme or reason to that other than that's just the way it has been.

I started singing Folksongs with my mother when I was 6 years old. We sang at Folk festivals and concerts and schools. There was always music being played either on record, Jazz and Folk, by musician friends of my mother. I took to singing very early, I believe it has been a Gift I was born with.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

I guess my biggest influence was actually my Grandfather. He used to play old records on vinyl, and would play old jazz and soul music like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and The Rat Pack and swing music.

I did everything I could to not bring in any of the - any of the technical things I got from classical into jazz. And I did everything to really base it on my speaking voice and to just not try to make it sound pretty.

Make no mistake, this music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen to your Snoop Doggy Dog, Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, but add a little Ellington, Basie and Coltrane to your life as well.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something thats never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.