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.

Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.'

I haven't got a great jazz band and I don't want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat's among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It's all in what you define as 'real jazz.' It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

I've always felt that most jazz artists don't need producers .. most jazz artists know what kind of sound they want. They don't need a producer to come in there and tell them, "Oh, I think you should do this." I've always found it very strange that there's been such a thing as producers in jazz.

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 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.

Jazz was always cool. That was what I liked about jazz - it was always cool. Now I see the cats that were basically cool getting kind of uncool. So that ruins what I feel about jazz.

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 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've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like jazz needs a big-ass slap.

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 really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.

Of course, right away I got more interested in the far-out jazz than the traditional jazz, so I quickly was turned onto the John Zorn scene and all the wild stuff coming out of New York and Europe. Improvising is a pretty natural thing for me.

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.

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.

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

Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.

Around middle school I studied jazz guitar and ended up playing in a jazz band for a bit. But, after high school, I haven't even touched a guitar.

I do ballet and pointe work. I also do tap, commercial jazz and technical jazz, freestyle street dancing.

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.

Well, I had started a program which is even longer running than this one in 1967 which was a jazz program called The Best of Jazz and that still goes out on Monday nights. That's been going for 33 years or something.

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.

My dad would play me all of these records: Miles Davis records, John Coltrane records, Bill Evans records, a lot of jazz records. My first exposure to music was listening to jazz records.

The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.

I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.

I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now.

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.

Jazz is so difficult. A lot of people think once they've learned these licks they can get up and play them for the rest of their life. But that's not being truthful to the music 'cause it's not developing. Cats you hear that don't make no mistakes? They ain't trying to do nothing. everything they hear is on the mark, but they've played it so many times... I've built a whole career out of making mistakes!

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 like to listen to classical music... I like mainline jazz.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

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.

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

Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We'll call it even.

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

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

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

The reason why the music [jazz] is important is because it's an art form-an ancient art form-that takes in the mythology of our people.

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

Jazz musicians can be great teachers of business. Their creativity is not dependent on their mood, it does not have to be coaxed out of them, it has nothing to do with the phases of the moon or even how they feel that day. They go on stage and start playing. Being creative is their job.

Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.

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 think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to listen to it.

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

I think of my life as divided between a lot of different periods. I grew up in the country, but as I got older I became more of an urban person. That's really when I started to become more of a creative person who was interested in fine arts, painting, drawing, and music. I studied jazz for a long time. Looking back, all those things were great training.

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