Jazz Quotes

Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it’s not a fad. It’s up to us to see to it that it stays alive.

I think the singer/songwriter genre is going to be like bluegrass and jazz. You can make a living at it, but it’s not part of the musical mainstream anymore.

I was lucky enough to grow up in an era when radio was less formatted. It was really special. You could hear a jazz song then a pop song then a show tune then some jazz. Basically, whatever the DJ felt like playing, he would play. He was educating you and exposing you to things you would never hear otherwise.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there’s one way that you do something, and that’s the only way. In jazz, it’s a lot different.

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music – you can’t do that in jazz. You can’t do that with classical.

My music is jazz.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

In ‘Where the Air is Clear‘, Carlos Fuentes composed a polyphonic portrait of Mexico City amid the growth and modernization brought on by the economic boom of the 1950s. The novel can be read as a jazz interpretation – free and in a Mexican key – of John Dos Passos’ ‘Manhattan Transfer‘.

Lately I’ve been listening to some classical music again, some jazz.

My grandfather, Arthur Baskerville, he played and still plays a little bit piano and trombone, and so when I was a kid, I always heard jazz around the house, but I also went to his gigs, whether it be a Saturday brunch in my hometown Columbus, Ohio. We’d go and hear him play with some of the local musicians.

Jazz stands for freedom. It’s supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don’t be a perfectionist – leave that to the classical musicians.

As a matter of fact, we put it down because we wanted to be jazz pickers.

You don’t have to be fearless to do anything; you can be scared out of your mind. I fear that I won’t get better and that I won’t have time to practice. To be called a ‘jazz musician‘ – it’s a big responsibility.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

I’m really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now – the New Orleans stuff – a lot more than I did before.

Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn’t even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that’s been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.

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.

Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise.

There’s a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they’ve been wearing.

Why can’t jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

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

The most ironic thing is my grandfather has his masters in music composition; he was a jazz composer. My dad was a musician, too. He played more, like, soul music.

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 want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they’ll become a great musician.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

‘Sunshine Superman‘ was a pioneering work that for the first time presented a fusion of Celtic, jazz, folk, rock, and Indian music as well as poetry.

Jazz in the 1920s and ’30s was dance music, teenage music for parties, for being wild and young. There’s this punk feeling I really love. It was something so radical and different and new and not codified. People didn’t have a definition of what they were doing.

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they’re trying to say with jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

I don’t like it when a player says, ‘I like freedom; I want to play for myself.’ Because the player has to understand he is part of a team with 10 other players. If everyone wants to be a jazz musician, it will be chaos. They will not be a team, and nothing will be possible.

One of my songs was on a jazz station for awhile. It was a song that I wrote for a jazz sax player friend of mine, and I sang and played the guitar on it.

I think with me and the type of music that I’m trying to make, it’s always going be soulful because I grew up listening to different types and variations of soulful melodies and jazz, but experimenting with different types of stylistic souls.

I’d have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I’d just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts.

Hip-hop and jazz have always been intertwined. Even the G-funk thing. You listen to ‘The Chronic,’ there’s flute solos and everything. It’s always been there.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

I came along in the ’60s having absorbed as much as I could up until then and added my own tastes and search into the equation. I guess that’s how I see ‘Now He Sings, Now He Sobs’ in relation to the development of jazz in general.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy‘s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.

The Zombies were really unique – they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.

Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul – the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.

I enjoy playing clubs. I still enjoy the closeness of the nightclub venue. However, after a certain period of time and after playing around some of the clubs in New YorkI felt that jazz should be presented in a more prestigious atmosphere.

Jazz is a racist musical form invented by whites to enslave blacks.

I’d have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I’d just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.

I flow between modern and traditional jazz, between samba and choro – all maybe in a week‘s time.

Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children‘s party taken over by the elders.

If I had to look at ‘Now He Sings’… from outside myself, I see it as a natural part of the growth of the jazz culture, which I’ve always been so happy – honored, really – to be a small part of.

I’m a pianist – I studied jazz piano in college.

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they’re trying to say with jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

New Age is a very small box. It was a term that was brought in by the music industry to classify music that is neither jazz, classical, pop or rock. They didn’t know what to call it or what to do with it. So they threw it all together under this one name.

I’ve been a massive obsessive about jazz singers all my life.

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.

I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.

One of the things jazz has always excelled at is translating the reality of the times through its musical prism.

There’s mediocre jazz, mediocre salesmen, mediocre golfers. If you want to be good, you have to really hone your skills.

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

You know I want to sing for people, I want to jazz people up I want to make new music that they’ve never heard.

I’ve been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

I think I was supposed to play jazz.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

I’m primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly ‘Frankenstein‘ had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there’s one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues.

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music – you can’t do that in jazz. You can’t do that with classical.

I had a jazz trio, a rock n’ roll band, and I played drums in junior high, high school, college, big bands, and I played timpani in the symphony. I am a drummer. It’s the one instrument I actually play pretty well. It’s just hard to carry on your back.

The first job I ever had was singing in a jazz club when I was like 15 with my friend, and we earned like 70 bucks. We were like, ‘Oh my God!’

Once ‘A.N.T. Farm‘ started, I was inspired by Chyna to jazz up my style. Now I paint my nails bright, fun colors and add a bunch of accessories and some cool shoes to jeans and a T-shirt.

I’m into the old school. I listen to rock, soft rock, jazz, old school R&B.

Jazz is a racist musical form invented by whites to enslave blacks.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n’ roll and jazz standards.

Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

I don’t know how much more what I’ve done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There’ve been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.

Everything that I’m doing, it’s like a future jazz, future trap house movement.

My parents have always been open to me trying new things, whether it’s yoga or ballet or tap or jazz or piano or horse riding.

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn’t methodical, but jazz isn’t messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

I am a big music guy. Hip-hop, R&B, old school, jazz.

Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn’t consider himself part of a tradition.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can’t explain it. They really can’t translate feeling because they’re not part of it. That’s why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.

I’ve got wide tastes, but I don’t like jazz.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

I think jazz is actually quite unforgiving in its disdain for nostalgia. It demands creativity and change at its highest level.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

I wasn’t into jazz so much – I preferred things raw.

It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

Given the hipness of transsexualism with people like Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings, there might be a third category, especially among children, and that is fashion.

When I was a kid, I wanted desperately to be a jazz musician. I would practice the trumpet for hours, but when I got braces, that messed up my ability to play, so all of a sudden I had all this free time.

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

I have this theory that I hold on to, the theory that everything great in art and in life in general is jazz. It’s just like all these things that just kind of seem to fall into place. You know, like mistakes that somehow turn into something beautiful.

My dad had two, sometimes three jobs. Besides running the Commodore Music Shop in Manhattan, he did jazz concerts, and he ran this great jazz label, Commodore.

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.