Quotes About Jazz

The average age of the Jazz audience is increasing rapidly. Rapidly enough to suggest that there is no replacement among young people. Young people aren't starting to listen to Jazz and carrying it along in their lives with them. Jazz is becoming more like Classical music in terms of its relationship to the audience. And just a Classical music is grappling with the problem of audience development, so is Jazz grappling with this problem. I believe, deeply that Jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say to ordinary people. But it has to be systematic about getting out the message.

I'm not a jazz musician, because, I mean, firstly, I can't play anything. I'm not bad on the tamborine. I have a certain way with the triangle. But I'm not a jazz musician ... my band, they always joke, they always say that I'm a disposable, pop, jazz superstar.

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

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

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.

Comedy is a funny thing, and it's really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title. You would never go to a club just to see "Live music," you would go to a jazz club to see jazz, a blues club to see blues, etc. But when you go to see "standup comedy," if you don't know the performers material, you really don't have any idea what you're gonna get.

I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.

A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He's above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.

In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

If you didn't have the amalgam of Blacks and African-type sensibility and European sensibility, you wouldn't have jazz. Even in the negative and in the positive ways - if there was no slavery and the abolition of slavery, there would be no jazz.

Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.

I do ballet and pointe work. I also do tap, commercial jazz and technical jazz, freestyle street dancing.

Shook is the musical universe I created. I come from a classical and jazz background and my father is a jazz pianist, so my world bears largely the marks of this influence. As a sort of gateway, I started composing my own music on the computer at the age of 13. Before Shook, I had not yet discovered the kind of music I wanted to dedicate myself to, so I did a little of everything.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

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.

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 cringed when I heard myself described as a Jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a Jazz vocalist.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!

You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, 'If you got to ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.'

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.

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

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.

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.

Sweets [Edison] can say more with one note than any other Jazz player alive... an approach that stresses simplicity, glorious tone, natural potency and an unmatched affinity. He is a unique stylist in our music.

D.C. is a great place. The music, jazz, has always been great here, the restaurants have always been fantastic here. And there's been a lot of changes in this city over the last 30 years, and all for the better.

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

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

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

In this country, particularly, actually in times that are difficult, or from corners of America where you least expect it, unbelievable pure creativity has welled up. Generally because of the cross-fertilization... a Scott Joplin tune becomes jazz, becomes blues, and becomes rock 'n' roll.

I have no illusions about being a genius musician. I pride myself on being a soldier, a warrior for jazz. I trained a lot of young people, and I've learned my lessons well. I'd like to keep the flame burning.

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

I love music. My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented !

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.

The blues and jazz will live forever... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.

If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician.

The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.

I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning.

I do after-school ballet and also hip-hop and jazz.

I was taking chemical engineering. But I went into the army after that. When I came out of the army, I was a different person. I met a lot of good jazz players in the army.

You learn from music, from watching great athletes at work - how disciplined they are, how they move. You learn these things by watching a shortstop at work, how he concentrates on one thing at a time. You learn from classic music, from the blues and jazz, from bluegrass. From all this, you learn how to sustain a great line without bringing in unnecessary words.

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz.

The law don't like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

Jazz is the music of the body.

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents, there must be respect for the people that have gone before.