Jazz Quotes
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Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.
Paul Desmond
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The thing that is making jazz healthy today is that people are coming out of other backgrounds - from rock, folk, from ethnic music. It's changing the music, and for the better.
Billy Taylor
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Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.
Wynton Marsalis
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Jazz is really about the human experience. It’s about the ability of human beings to take the worst of circumstances and struggles and turn it into something creative and constructive. That’s something that’s built into the fiber of every human being. And I think that’s why people can respond to it. They feel the freedom in it. And the attributes of jazz are also admirable. It’s about dialogue. It’s about sharing. And teamwork. It’s in the moment, and it's nonjudgmental.
Herbie Hancock
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I listen to instrumental jazz and bluegrass, but aside from my AM workout, I have no rituals.
David B. Coe
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Like, I'm trying to make a statement that clean comedy is somehow better or loftier than dirty comedy, and I don't feel that way at all. I just think it's different. It's different. There's rock music, there's jazz music, there's reggae music: All of those forms are different.
Brian Regan
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Duke Ellington's career traces the entire history of jazz. The repertoire associated with him contains the most important elements in the music and provides concrete examples of some of the best ways to present the music in the widest variety of settings-radio, TV, recordings, movies, concert halls, festivals, solo, small ensemble, big band, symphony orchestra, opera, Broadway shows.... You name it, he did it!
Billy Taylor
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I like a lot of electronica. I like older jazz rather than newer.
Greg Ginn
Black Flag
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Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.
Sarah Churchwell
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I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.
Eunice Kathleen Waymon
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Amsterdam must have more than a million people. But the only area where jazz is really profitable and successful in an economic sense is in Japan. That's because they haven't been exposed enough.
Norman Granz
