Jazz Quotes
-
Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.
Talib Kweli
Black Star
-
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
-
I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.
Rickie Lee Jones
-
Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone to all of these.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
-
I didn't like progressive jazz or anything. Rock was something I like to listen to.
Floor Jansen
Nightwish
-
Jazz is musical humor. The noun jazz describes a modern American technique for the playing of any music, accompanied by noise called harmony, and interpolated instrumental effects. It also describes music exhibiting influence of that technique which has as its traditional object to secure the effects of surprise, or in the broadest sense, humor.
Bix Beiderbecke
-
They're not carpenters. There's not a lot of need for jazz trombone players in Shreveport, La.
Ben Jaffe
-
I'm really not this jazz traditionalist guy you've been making me out to be all of these years.
Christian McBride
-
You listen to a Metallica song, and you listen to the drums, and they're not necessarily swinging, but the arrangements are different. Why is that? Because it's more in tune with jazz arrangements. It's very different. It's not a traditional rock and roll production, in terms of the drums.
Robert Trujillo
Metallica
-
I like a lot of electronica. I like older jazz rather than newer.
Greg Ginn
Black Flag
-
The history of all big jazz bands shows was, first they played for dancing, and then they played for singing.
Norman Granz
-
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