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 visited New York in '63, intending to move there, but I noticed that what I valued about jazz was being discarded. I ran into `out-to-lunch' free jazz, and the notion that groove was old-fashioned. All around the United States, I could see jazz becoming linear, a horn-player's world. It made me realize that we were not jazz musicians; we were territory musicians in love with all forms of African-American music. All of the musicians I loved were territory musicians, deeply into blues and gospel as well as jazz.

"Jazz" to begin with, is a really bad word... all the true musicians that really play jazz, jazz is the worst word for it. Jazz is a process. Jazz is a creative process. It's not so much a genre, but a way of expression.

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.

I don't like heroin, unless you're a jazz musician and then you have to be on it because jazz is the sound of heroin.

I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.

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

The hardest thing about being a young musician on the jazz scene is that there are so many styles of music, jazz and otherwise, that you're exposed to. The challenge is to use all that in your own way, to personalize all that has come before you and all that is happening around you. To get the music the way you want it, there's a lot of work involved.

Robert Altman made that movie Kansas City about the jazz scene in the city, and we saw that band all together, and that was an amazing show. That's what I got into. I like jazz.

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.

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.

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.

There are a million examples of not feeling the jazz, but using the jazz.

I'd much prefer to hear somebody like Ed Thigpen [drummer with New York session group Stuff, and featured on innumerable hits] take a solo. I mean, that's what it is. I'd much rather hear that than the jazz/rock thing because it's blowing an aspect of jazz that I really like...the level where you can snap your fingers to it and you can groove to it. You can do anything to it.

I was co-editor of the magazine called The Jazz Review, which was a pioneering magazine because it was the only magazine, then or now, in which all the articles were written by musicians, by jazz men. They had been laboring for years under the stereotype that they weren't very articulate except when they picked up their horn.

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.

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

And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it.

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.

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.

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

I have a theory that musicians recognize each other and if they are destined to collaborate together they will. Mainly, they recognize each other according to the class they belong to. If they are punk-rocker kids from the neighborhood, they are going form a band. If they happen to be musicians that are going to play in pubs and restaurants, they are going to recognize each other, form a band and play together. If it's about musicians that are playing jazz and are going to jazz festivals, for e.g., then they are going to meet and work together.

I don't listen to a lot of music when I have my free time. But I'll go to a jazz club and have a drink and listen to a good jazz musician. Or sometimes in the morning, if I want to put myself in a good mood, I'll put on some Latin 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.

I hired Bob at Terrytoons. He was my assistant animator, and then became an animator himself. He had just come from Boston with his family and was a brilliant draftsman as well as a great jazz guitarist. We had lots of fun nights in Greenwich Village together and then later hanging in LA. Bob worked on Fritz the Cat , Heavy Traffic , Coonskin , and on Wizards . I am terribly saddened by his passing and will miss him dearly.

Girls liking bad boys is the cookie jar complex. When somebody tells you you can't have a cookie, you want a cookie. But I live in a bad-boy world, artistically. All the jazz boys are bad boys.

Black people invented jazz. But this story [in La La Land] wasn't ever claiming to be that. It's just a story about two people from one writer's point of view.

The people know more about [Jazz] in other countries than in America. America is the last country to know about anything, because we're too fat, we have too much of everything, you understand? And we do not listen.

When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of "jazz" as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

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

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

I was interested in Armstrong to begin with because he is the most important figure in Jazz in the 20th Century. There's simply no question about it. I mean, if you're going to compare him to somebody, it's Shakespeare in terms of centrality of the tradition, in being at the beginning of it.

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.

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 was in punk rock bands, heavy metal bands, world music bands, jazz groups, any type of music that would take me. I just love music.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

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

I love pop music. It's not easy to write a good pop song. It may be easier to put out a fake jazz album, as Sting does from time to time.

[On Lisa Kudrow:] She's like the best kind of jazz there is. You don't know what note she's going to hit and it's always a surprise.

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

If you play jazz, then you play with your fingers. If you're playing rock, you use a pick. There's really no rhyme or reason to that other than that's just the way it has been.

Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

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.

I have I guess 3 passions. One is the Constitution. The other is jazz and the other is being an atheist prolifer which, of course, gets me in a lot of trouble - all of which combines into free expression.

I was never that big a rock-and-roll, rock guy. I really preferred jazz, you know, that kind of thing.