Quotes About Jazz

I haven't got a great jazz band and I don't want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat's among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It's all in what you define as 'real jazz.' It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons.

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 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 love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.

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.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? Safe sex of the highest order.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.

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.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

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 really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Robert Altman made that movie Kansas City about the jazz scene in the city, and we saw that band all together, and that was an amazing show. That's what I got into. I like jazz.

Jazz isn't as profitable for labels like Hip hop or Rap. Jazz needs subsidies to continue, just like European classical works of Bach and Beethoven are subsidized.

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation. Someone once wrote that the sound of surprise is jazz, and if there's any one thing that we must try to get used to in this world, it's surprise and the unexpected. Truly, we are living in world where the only thing that's constant is change.

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

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

If you're making money people don't think you're playing Jazz. When you're not making money they think you're a great Jazz musician.

When a human being is oppressed, the natural tendency is to feel anger. Jazz is a response to oppression that is not bullets and blood. Jazz is the expression of harmony ... and at the same time of hope and freedom.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

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.

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.

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.

'Jazz Artist of the Century' would have to be a distinctive soloist and ensemble player, a composer, an arranger, a bandleader, and a driver; would have to span all the genres and periods of jazz; would have to have run her own label; [would] possess a deep spirituality, with grace and a sense of humor; and would have to have succeeded against all odds. Who else? Mary Lou Williams.

Not according to this," Jazz said, taking the report. "No evidence of sexual activity or anything like it." "Well, there's that," Howie said, sounding relieved. Jazz wondered at that - was it really so much better to be unmolested, but still murdered in a horrible fashion? To die in pain and terror, stripped, left in a field, your fingers cut off? But as long as you weren't raped, well, that was alright, then? Did it really matter at that point?

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

I love jazz. I still do. Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz are so good. I took a notification course in Jazz Orchestration. It wasn't a grandiose as you'd think but I did have to to go to Los Angeles to do it and get an understanding of the keyboard because the keyboard became my tool and I used it a lot in transposing and composing. All the flats and time values. I spent a year doing that because in those days you had to be able to write your own music and read sheets.

The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.

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.

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

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

I became a jazz fan quite early and never went off the path thereafter.

It (jazz) isn't like it used to be. The guys aren't together. They're all separated. Individuals now. Bird was a symbol. It was a clique, a clique of people. Who all believed in one thing: gettin' high. And playin'.

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!

I like the idea of an eclectic approach, incorporating jazz with other forms and other genres of music.

I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem.

I like rock music. I like jazz better, though.

A Jazz man should be saying what he feels: humor, sadness, joy... all the things that humans have.

What I've been trying to do for years is to get the music played on a station other than jazz stations, you know, to expand the audience.

Jazz is restless. It won't stay put & it never will.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.