Jazz Quotes
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Bop is no love-child of jazz.
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One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.
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Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.
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I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.
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A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.
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Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.
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I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.
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Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'
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Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.
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I really want to bring ensemble playing back to the forefront - not just for me, but for everyone in jazz. When you have a group, a true co-op group, you can really heighten the possibilities of all the treasures of jazz.
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I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It's not like I'm cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.
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I think I was supposed to play jazz.
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For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.
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In the '70s... there were rock players, and there were jazz players.
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Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing.
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I wanted to keep pushing the musical ideas I had about jazz, music from Africa and the Caribbean.
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One of the things jazz has always excelled at is translating the reality of the times through its musical prism.
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I used to sing in jazz clubs with a friend until she went another way.
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Even though I left for a year, I grew here as a Jazz man. If I'm fortunate enough to go into the Hall of Fame, I will go as a Jazz man.
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I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.
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I never gave up on that idea, you know, that jazz musicians have the same opportunity as everybody else and that it's what you put on that record that makes the difference whether you sell it or not or are able to get it into people's households.
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If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
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In Malaysia, we have a lot of divas, like Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey singers. And they were all so so talented, just very talented. For example, there's this one jazz singer, her name is Sheila Majid, and I was always singing her songs.
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You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.
