Quotes About Jazz

Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.

When I sort of step in my jazz world, it's somewhere between instrumental jazz and vocal jazz.

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.

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 was very lucky, because when I was at school, I had a great music teacher who would just take out these free-jazz records and play them for me. So it was in my early teens that I started to listen to jazz.

I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.

I'm not a jazz singer, blues singer or country singer. I'm a singer that can sing rhythm & blues, that can sing jazz, that can sing country. There's a big difference. In other words, I'm not a specialist.

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.

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 needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.

Our intention is to not only attract the hardcore jazz fan, but we're doing it in such a way that it will also be easy to take for those who are not necessarily steeped in the ways of jazz.

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.

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.

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it, it's like 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.

There aren't any labels - all jazz means is improvization and you can never play a tune the same way twice. So jazz spills over into everything.

I had an affinity for music and could play anything I heard on the piano, but I wasn't scholastically advanced in any way. It was more of a habitual tendency. I would work on weekends at piano bars playing jazz when I was an art student, but the music wasn't mine - it was covers: everything from Radiohead to really old jazz. But other than that, the only training I had was piano lessons from when I was nine until I was eleven.

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

The Democrat Party today is not enamored of Bill Clinton. They may not even be enamored of Hillary [Clinton]. But the things that jazzed Democrats back in the nineties are nowhere near the things that jazz the Democrats of today.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.

I feel that I have an obligation to jazz and also to myself to play as good as I can play.

My first Grammy wasn't even in a jazz category, but of course I was really excited. 'Rockit' was the beginning of kind of a new era for the whole hip-hop movement.

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.

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

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

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.

Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.

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

Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise... but a way of life.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

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

Make no mistake, this music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen to your Snoop Doggy Dog, Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, but add a little Ellington, Basie and Coltrane to your life as well.

I've always explored things that people find a bit more freakish, like free jazz, and I'd gotten to a point where the live music I was making was really hectic and turning much more confrontational. So when I started working on Everything Ecstatic, that was very normal for me. I think it was a departure, but people read it as an escape from something, whereas every record I do is, I feel, a departure.

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.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

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

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 think of my life as divided between a lot of different periods. I grew up in the country, but as I got older I became more of an urban person. That's really when I started to become more of a creative person who was interested in fine arts, painting, drawing, and music. I studied jazz for a long time. Looking back, all those things were great training.

It's hard to explain what happens when jazz and punk fuse with a violin twist but it works. Probably because Anson Choi takes off his shirt while he's playing the saxophone. Whoever's not chatting up a Cadet or a girl from Darling House or playing chess with the guys is watching the band. I turn into a groupie.

In jazz improv, there is no such thing as wrong notes, only notes that are better chosen and it's not about the note you play, it's about the note you play next.

One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.

American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.

I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.

I just saw a recent television program about art, and it was saying how from the end of the Second World War, so much of what our culture is comes from not just the United States in general, but New York in particular. In my case, I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

There are a lot of records coming out, in every field of music, not just jazz.

Benny Goodman's band was integrated before baseball. Even before it was physically integrated, music was integrated. Everyone listened to Armstrong and Ellington. The 20s was called the Jazz Age. It's part of being American.

I've always romanticized the late '40s and '50s - the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.