Quotes About Jazz

I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded.

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.

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 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.

Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

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.

Jazz has the power to make men forget their differences and come together... Jazz is the personification of transforming overwhelmingly negative circumstances into freedom, friendship, hope, and dignity.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

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.

I did listen to 1920s jazz or Al Johnson and a lot of early singers coming out of England. I would branch out a little bit to get a sense of the world that he might be coming into, in the '30s when jazz was changing.

I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.

Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.

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

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

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 think we're an inspiration to young people, to know they can be honest and not run away from influences that are not jazz. We're definitely breeding a new wave of jazz, for real.

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.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

The jazz guitarist Peter Sprague calls his home recording studio SpragueLand, but sometimes it seems that the moniker better captures the way he has turned the entire southland into his own musical playground. Sprague is a highly versatile musician who draws on the wellsprings of jazz and Brazilian music as primary influences.

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.

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

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

Jazz is musical humor. The noun jazz describes a modern American technique for the playing of any music, accompanied by noise called harmony, and interpolated instrumental effects. It also describes music exhibiting influence of that technique which has as its traditional object to secure the effects of surprise, or in the broadest sense, humor.

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.

I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and am a product of a family that were jazz aficionados and also very interested in progressive politics. And so I had a lot of artists and musicians in my home. Lots of Latin music, folk, and jazz and blues, bluegrass-type of stuff. Painters and stuff like that.

When you think of diversity, George Duke fits that bill better than a lot of people. He's played a lot of straight-ahead jazz with people like Nancy Wilson and Cannonball Adderley; he's played a lot of fusion with his own groups, with Stanley Clarke; and, you know, he did the rock thing with Frank Zappa. He's written all kinds of big arrangements for people like Burt Bacharach. So, he's covered the board. He's still a great pianist.

From the small clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where he began playing saxophone to world tours for the biggest of the big bands, Benny Carter redefined American jazz. From the start, his fellow musicians said the way he played the sax was amazing. They say that about me, too. (Laughter.) But I don't think they mean it in quite the same way.

It (jazz) isn't like it used to be. The guys aren't together. They're all separated. Individuals now. Bird was a symbol. It was a clique, a clique of people. Who all believed in one thing: gettin' high. And playin'.

I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.

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.

Jazz is so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

That's a skill that I'm proud of: to be able to be a jazz musician and go a bit crazy sometimes and other times be able to pull it all in and lay it down like a track.

When Jazz broke through in England, I remember sneaking to listen on the radio much to my parent's disapproval.

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

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

Jazz is not background music.

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

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 actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that.

I listen to classical music very much. There's a lot of jazz that I don't enjoy listening to.

I'm definitely not a laptop/midi/abelton guy. But there is a lot of music I like. I really like Bach organ music. I really like Chopin piano music. I really like Wendy Carlo's electronic music. I really like Miles Davis and John Mclaughlin jazz style. So I'm not only an old-school rocker, but I have to admit that I'm going to be listening to The Doors, Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, David Bowie and Bob Dylan many times a week.

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.

Jazz to me is a living music.

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.

African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.

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