Quotes About Jazz

My school music teacher, Al Bennest, introduced me to jazz by playing Louis Armstrong's record of "West End Blues" for me. I found more jazz on the radio, and began looking for records. My paper route money, and later, money I earned working after school in a print shop and a butcher shop went toward buying jazz records. I taught myself the alto saxophone and the drums in order to play in my high school dance band.

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.

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

I've played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I've been fortunate enough to play with them, a who's who. All of those guys, I've been fortunate enough to have performed with.

Just because I'm playing jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.

The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it's quite palpable but not visible. It's always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

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 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.

I find that jazz loosens up the deep place of my mind, lets me find my own strange rhythms. Generally, I find the knottier the jazz, the better. Anything with singing is a distraction. Listening to classical music tends to have the unconscious effect of making my writing too smooth.

The French - they like jazz, theyve been on jazz a long time.

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.

Some kids in Italy call me 'Mama Jazz; I thought that was so cute. As long as they don't call me 'Grandma Jazz.'

Jazz is a big thing with me. It's a very big passion of mine, to play it. I'm an amateur musician and I love everything about it. I was obsessed with jazz when I was 15 years old and I know a lot about it because I've loved it so much.

Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and many other great jazz musicians objected to their music being called jazz. While the outside world may want to put a label on it, those who create it think of it just as music, and tend not to classify it.

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.

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.

I've listened to Jazz since I was born and always knew I'd be a Jazz singer!

My dad was a jazz fan and he used to have lots of old 78s, so I grew up with big jazz bands and the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie - although I really liked show tunes from those big musicals as well. I've always kept my ears open, as it were, when it comes to music. It doesn't matter to me what type of music it is. If I like it, I'll listen to it.

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.

Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones

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.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.

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

I was into jazz even when I was a kid. My parents would play Ella Fitzgerald, George Shearing, and Dixieland music. I loved The Monkees, The Beatles, The Eagles, and America.

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

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.

From the small clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where he began playing saxophone to world tours for the biggest of the big bands, Benny Carter redefined American jazz. From the start, his fellow musicians said the way he played the sax was amazing. They say that about me, too. (Laughter.) But I don't think they mean it in quite the same way.

I think jazz is good, but I don't enjoy it. It's not for me.

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.

The most common misconception about me is that I'm basically a jazz singer.

A lot of EDM is not bad at all when it's simple, but a lot of it is not really musical. That's just what I really like to do: taking what I had at the beginning, which is classical and jazz influences, and putting it into electro.

Visually I've always liked the 20s 30s for film. I do these because I like the music. I like the clothes. I like the way the women and the guys look. There are soldiers and sailors and gangsters with the machine guns in their violin cases. It's a very colorful era of New York, full of great theater and great nightclubs and great jazz.

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 always say that you should just listen to it and see what you think it sounds like it is. I don't think it should be labeled. Most musicians feel like that. No one wants to put their music in a category. But, I don't think it's all over the place. I don't go from metal to jazz, or anything crazy.

Regarding jam sessions: Jazz musicians are the only workers I can think of who are willing to put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.

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

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

Jazz to me is a living music.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.

Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.

In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about.

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.

There's the tradition in jazz of having the “Battle of the Bands” and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.

I just try to do as good job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and do that every night. Just see where it goes.