Quotes About Jazz

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

I was going to say is that I come from a rock background, but also I was super interested in jazz for a long time. I was training to be a jazz musician for quite a while. I never trained to be a classical composer or player, but I did train to play 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.

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

The cool thing is that jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit. Because in jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best, we're non-judgmental.

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.

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.

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.

I'd actually been making my living as an organist with bands since I was probably 15 or 16 years old, and then as a senior in high school I put together a jazz quintet called The Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet.

As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars.

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.

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

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.

Improvisation in the jazz sense - like the business sense - is not formless. It is built on a skill set. Jazz, for example, involves selecting a tune.

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.

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

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

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

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

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!

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical.

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.

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

At a time when individualism is becoming an endangered species, jazz represents a celebration of the individual.

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

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

There's no future without the past and anybody who doesn't really understand where jazz has come from has no right to try to direct where it's going.

The virtuoso element in jazz playing, all those very fast runs in the upper extremes, simply doesn't appeal to me. That's why I don't want to make my concerto "virtuosic" in the sense of a technical show-off. I want a beautiful sound and a melodic and lyrical line. I am more interested in the way someone can play musically.

The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

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

In blues, classical and jazz, you get more revered with age.

I do modern jazz and contemporary combined. I like to feel strong, flexible, and so there is stretching involved.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning.

Don't believe that jazz about there's nothing you can do, "turn on and drop out, man" - because you've got to turn on and drop in, or they're going to drop all over you.

Well, actually, I don't consider myself a jazz legend or anything.

The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.

Jazz is the music of the body.

I fear that I won't get better and that I won't have time to practice. To be called a "jazz musician" - it's a big responsibility.

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

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz. If someone drops a note, someone else must step into the vacuum and drive the beat that sustains the team.