Quotes About Jazz

I worry more about the marketing that's taken hold since the 70s. The Jazz era, the Swing era, those were huge. Entire decades were named for music. In the 1940s - after World War II - changes in taxation, ballrooms closing, people moving to the suburbs, and the onset of target marketing and the confusion of commerce with art caused some things to happen as a result that have taken us away from jazz and what jazz offers us.

I was very adamant about not being called a jazz singer, but now I've embraced it. The way I approach music is through jazz, so I'm a jazz singer.

I really love jazz, but I will never be a jazz musician as much as I dream. But, I think that the jazz music I love is there in my music.

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 remember the first time I was booked into a jazz club. I was scared to death. I'm not a jazz artist. So I got to the club and spotted this big poster saying, 'Richie Havens, folk jazz artist.' Then I'd go to a rock club and I'm billed as a 'folk rock performer' and in the blues clubs I'd be a 'folk blues entertainer.'

Sometimes when I do a joke and it doesn't get a lot of laughs, it kind of feels like I'm doing jazz. That's kinda cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks ... Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.

What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.

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.

If you want the film [La La Land ] to represent all things jazz, it does not. You'll be disappointed by that. But, if you just see it as one guy's point of view, one filmmaker's point of view, and one story among many stories that can be told about jazz, then it's not as much of an issue.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream 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.

In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory.

I don't really think in terms of the future of literature. I think literature will be around "forever" - but in a relatively niche way, like jazz and poetry, although probably more widely consumed than jazz and poetry since it's fundamentally a narrative form. And I think that's important and places like Word Riot and 'The New York Tyrant' and 'n+1' will be responsible for keeping it alive.

Keith Moon is not interested in Jazz and won't ever be a Jazz drummer because he's more interested in looking good and being screamed at.

When jazz is played in another nation, it is called American. When it is played in another country, it sounds false. Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

Bop began with Jazz but one afternoon somewhere on a sidewalk maybe 1939, 1940, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk was walking past a men's clothing store on 42nd Street or South Main in L.A. and from a loudspeaker they suddenly heard a wild impossible mistake in jazz that could only have been heard inside their own imaginary head, and that is a new art. Bop.

In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

We all listened to a lot of recorded music, especially American jazz, modern jazz, and that's where our studies were and our inspiration came from.

This is a tradition of resistance to the term that's as old as the term itself, especially because that term has been used to commodify and reduce black creativity, and also to appropriate and sell it. That's what John Coltrane said in an interview with a Japanese journalist: "Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist." And he's treated as one of the central figures in the history of jazz. So if he rejected it, then why is it weird when I do it? I'm in the tradition!

To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!

As far as piano players are concerned, Oscar Peterson is my very favorite. I also like McCoy Tyner. I think that the big jazz stars, both now and in the past...how shall I say it? These guys are as great as Bach, Beethoven; all of them. People don't know it yet. If jazz survives and is put on a pedestal as an art form, the same as classical music has been through the years, a hundred years from now the kids will know who they were, with that kind of respect.

The history of jazz for the last 45 years has come through the Monterey Jazz Festival stages. I think there's developed a legacy and an aura around the festival.

People who love jazz musicians love us when we play what we want to play and we're starving. But as soon as you commercialize your sound like Wes Montgomery did, the jazz fans and the critics are down on you!

Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record.

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.

Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

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.

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!

I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.

I'm a jazz musician by education and vocation, but I don't think jazz should [ dictate] what I want to do.

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.

Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

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.

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!

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

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

I was raised on piano and saxophone and jazz music for ten or twelve years. Before I even picked up a bass. My whole family has always pushed the arts, you know? My brother is a doctor of music and my cousin is an opera singer over in Austria. Arts were always a big thing in our family.

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.

When I got this saxophone, it became a religion. There wasn't TV, there wasn't much money, and there was just a real dedication.... I never thought of it as an art. It was just work that I loved. Not just work, but work that I loved. I loved it so much, I would play it if nobody listened to it. Any jazz musician, if there's nobody around to listen, would play just for the sheer joy of improvising music.

I kind of grew up a guitar nerd and I tried to figure out how to shred on an acoustic guitar as a kid, while listening to jazz or whatever. So that is kind of a different thing and my church background, growing up with worship kind of the ground that I learned how to play music from. Those are all odd ways of growing up, compared to most people, so I think the music has plenty of uniqueness in that.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties.

Avant-garde, jazz, pop, classical, country and western, rock, free, straight-ahead, etc. are ultimately meaningless terms in the face of the music being discussed at best - at worst, those terms often serve as code words for what is in fact a cultural / political discussion more than a musical one.

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 to me is a living music.

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.