Quotes About Jazz

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 can only be me. I do what I do, I'm not a jazz player. ... I don't play jazz standards, at least not in any recognizable way. It's not my turf but I have plenty of respect for that style of playing.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

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.

Trombone virtuoso and innovative composer, Papo combines the best of jazz and Latin music to create a genre that is unique and wild. He's redefined Latin 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. ... I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues. ... I don't need time, I need a deadline. ...There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind. ... Music is my mistress, and she plays second fiddle to no one.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

My father had played cornet, although I never saw him play it. I found his mouthpiece when I was a kid. I used to buzz it. And my mother played piano and sang in the church choir for different functions. So there was always music in the house, jazz, gospel, or whatever. Especially jazz records.

If you didn't have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn't have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways - if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz.

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 isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going to survive unless it's got some jazz influence.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

As far as piano players are concerned, Oscar Peterson is my very favorite. I also like McCoy Tyner. I think that the big jazz stars, both now and in the past...how shall I say it? These guys are as great as Bach, Beethoven; all of them. People don't know it yet. If jazz survives and is put on a pedestal as an art form, the same as classical music has been through the years, a hundred years from now the kids will know who they were, with that kind of respect.

Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and many other great jazz musicians objected to their music being called jazz. While the outside world may want to put a label on it, those who create it think of it just as music, and tend not to classify it.

I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.

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.

You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, 'If you got to ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.'

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 feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.

I'd like to do something involving jazz. But books are how I earn my living, and I'd like to stay with the horse I rode in on.

I listen to all kinds of songs. There's something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it's pop or jazz or hip-hop.

"The Hallmark Sessions" is an extraordinary release. Breau plays beautiful chords (sounding a little like Johnny Smith in spots) and inventive single-note lines. It is remarkable that this music was not released until 2003, but a happy event that it was finally put out. This is a must for Breau fans and an important release for all jazz guitar lovers.

Avant-garde, jazz, pop, classical, country and western, rock, free, straight-ahead, etc. are ultimately meaningless terms in the face of the music being discussed at best - at worst, those terms often serve as code words for what is in fact a cultural / political discussion more than a musical one.

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."

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

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.

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.

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.

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

The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.

I'm sure someone out there has a workable solution. But what do I know? I make comic books and write about jazz. I do know the difference between right and wrong, though.

Life is a lot like jazz. It's best when you improvise.

If you're an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you've got to change. You've got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you've been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n' roll, blues, then do it.

Jazz stands for freedom.

I don't know if the music moves forward anymore. I haven't heard anything for years - except refinement - coming out of the jazz world.

I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.

I would urge a young player to listen to Charlie Christians' sense of time ... I'll never forget listening to my father (Bucky Pizzarelli) and Tal Farlow playing Christians' 'Solo Flight' backstage at a gig... that's when it hit me how big of an effect Christian had on jazz guitar. 'Solo Flight' was like the gospel.

If it wasn't for hustlers, gangsters & gamblers there'd be no Jazz. Wasn't middle~class who said Let's go hear Bird tonight.

Jazz is part folk art, part progressive art.

Dinner 'conversation' at the Cohens' meant my sister, mom, and I relaying in brutal detail the day's events in a state of amplified hysteria, while my father listened to his own smooth jazz station in his head.

I do find modern jazz quite tricky.

The singer who really opened the door for me was Sarah Vaughan. But I listen to so much music, especially when I was growing up. My parents loved jazz music, so on Saturday [laughing] it would be the "Longine's Symphonettes," and on Sunday it was Mahalia Jackson.

But if you want to be a songwriter-based musician, whether you play punk or rock or country or jazz, whatever, you have to work on your songwriting and you have to work on being able to play in front of people, I think. That performance is how you create the groundwork for a lasting career.