Quotes About Jazz

Jazz is an endless source of ideas, because you can use anything. You can play operatic arias. You can incorporate them into jazz. You can play gypsy music and incorporate it into jazz. You can European classical and you can incorporate it into jazz. You can use anything and jazz it up, as they used to say.

I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.

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 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.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to decide where jazz starts or where it stops, where Tin Pan Alley begins and jazz ends, or even where the borderline lies between between classical music and jazz. I feel there is no boundary line

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.'

The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his lifes work.

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.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

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'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.

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.

The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It's recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race's sophistication upon the anguish of the black.

Jazz has the power to make men forget their differences and come together... Jazz is the personification of transforming overwhelmingly negative circumstances into freedom, friendship, hope, and dignity.

A lot of people in the jazz community are looking at how much notoriety we're getting. And we're an inspiration to a lot of young people, because now there's something new they can aim for that's in their grasp. Because a lot of times when you attend a jazz college it's all about the history, none of the teachers there are forward-thinking, for the most part, so they don't teach you how to be yourself and embrace the music around you.

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.

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.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.

I couldn't get my album played over the so-called smooth jazz stations. Jazz stations would not play it. You don't always know who you're making that soul connection with.

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.

One of the most obvious aspects of the music to people who know jazz is: How does it feel in the swing? These are things that are very subtle and that jazz musician appreciate in a particular way. I appreciate the way Tommy Flanagan swings, the way that Barry Harris swings, the great pulse that Hank Jones and Bill Evans have - end every one of them is different.

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

I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

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.

Being materialistic is part of the hip-hop community's nature, because jazz and blues and rock 'n' roll, when they started out in the urban communities, were about the American Dream, and the lack of opportunity in that structure. So they talked about everything - uplifting and getting what is perceived as success in America.

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

Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.

Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it's a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don't listen.

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

So from Jazz, Blues, R&B, Soul, Classical and Country music, Hip Hop has introduced us to a little bit of everything.

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.

If you're in jazz and more than ten people like you, you're labeled commercial.

I grew up with classical music blasting in my parents' living room and my older brother's practicing saxophone in his room listening to jazz... a beautiful chaos.

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

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.

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

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.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Normal adults can doodle, amble, and drift with no need to assess risk, since there is normally no risk at all. Jazz improvisation seems less subject to standards of risk than surgery, and less than much formal athletic performance, as in a tennis match.

If you go back to the roots of jazz, it was all about COLLECTIVE improvisation.

Marijuana is taken by musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

In order to play jazz, you have to be able to play the blues.

The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.

What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!