Quotes About Jazz

I have always loved jazz music and as a teen growing up in New York City and then later on as an adult have great memories of the jazz clubs that were all located on 52nd Street. I still catch as many jazz shows as I can when I am in New York. And when I perform, I have my jazz quartet by my side. Jazz musicians keep things spontaneous and very "live," which is the way I like to perform.

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.'

Jazz is a music that really allows a person to express his deepest self, his most personal self - Africa being the primary source of jazz. Naturally, improvisation and swing are a part of jazz, improvisation being the key.

We're [with Robbie Robertson ] jazz musicians. The context may be rock 'n' roll but it's still jazz. It's jazz and that means improvization...you play a tune the way it feels and you play it differently every time. It can never be the same.

For me jazz is kind of an extension of hip-hop. Kind of the sad thing is that a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.

The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his lifes work.

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.

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.

Everything comes from one thing, everything comes from the Spirit. Jazz would not exist had it not been for gospel music, the blues would not exist had it not been for spiritual blues, which goes back to slave songs our fore fathers were singing while they were out in the field. So it's all one continuous growth from one group of people. Of course jazz now is played by various cultures and colors around the world. But the stimulus is One Voice.

Nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era from the '20's or bebop from the Swing Era or Avant-garde from Bebop, or Effusion, or on and on and on. So, we don't really know where it's going.

[Manhattan School Of Music] didn't' have a jazz undergraduate program at the time so I played a semester in the big band. There was a graduate program. But I wasn't really that involved in jazz yet.

I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.

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.

Through the dark days of legalized segregation and on into the civil rights era, jazz shone as a beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding. It seemed as if the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color.

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.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

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 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.

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.

When a human being is oppressed, the natural tendency is to feel anger. Jazz is a response to oppression that is not bullets and blood. Jazz is the expression of harmony ... and at the same time of hope and freedom.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

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.

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

To my ears, jazz sounds better in warm weather and after the sun has gone down. While I will listen to some of my favorite jazz records in cooler weather, it's the warmer nights that really make them come alive. Something about those sounds and the heat of the night really makes it happen for me.

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.

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.

I love jazz. I still do. Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz are so good. I took a notification course in Jazz Orchestration. It wasn't a grandiose as you'd think but I did have to to go to Los Angeles to do it and get an understanding of the keyboard because the keyboard became my tool and I used it a lot in transposing and composing. All the flats and time values. I spent a year doing that because in those days you had to be able to write your own music and read sheets.

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.

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

I listen to Neil Young and jazz and classical stations and, if my girlfriend's driving, it tends to be Hall & Oates.

I like rock music. I like jazz better, though.

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

It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide our attention when we're listening, and how we can refine what we're doing musically. Also how we can create our own music, and what opportunities that can bring us, as creative musicians. And then insisting that musicians put themselves through an intellectually rigorous process, which involves a lot of reading and writing, while insisting that music scholars think about ethics.

I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.

I love jazz and funk, because it's hard. If it's not hard, it's not worth doing.

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

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 started playing jazz by slowing down Tal Farlow records and analyzing his runs

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.

Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

[Sweets Edison] was one of the greatest stylists in Jazz of all time. And on top of that, when you listen to him, you say 'yes, that's Sweets' and you automatically smile. This is really unique. He changed the way how to play this instrument.

I think jazz and comic books are probably the two uniquely American art forms.

The blues and jazz will live forever... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

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

It's almost worse because you think that you're mature and classic when you're in the newsie cap jazz phase. It's not a great look, a young person trying to seem old and mature and cultured. That's a summarily not-cool look.

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.