Jazz Quotes
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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.
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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.
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It seems all worlds of music - rock, blues, R&B, soul, hip-hop and others - are able to point to impromptu get-togethers as proud moments in their timelines, encounters that were recorded and created music of lasting impression. In the jazz tradition, there are a few, but none that has been revered for as long as Jazz at Massey Hall.
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I think when you look back at the different eras in jazz, what leads from one to another is never a melodic revolution, but a rhythmic revolution.
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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.
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I'm really not this jazz traditionalist guy you've been making me out to be all of these years.
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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.
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I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.
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The history of all big jazz bands shows was, first they played for dancing, and then they played for singing.
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They're not carpenters. There's not a lot of need for jazz trombone players in Shreveport, La.
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I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.
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I didn't like progressive jazz or anything. Rock was something I like to listen to.
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The jazz guitarist Peter Sprague calls his home recording studio SpragueLand, but sometimes it seems that the moniker better captures the way he has turned the entire southland into his own musical playground. Sprague is a highly versatile musician who draws on the wellsprings of jazz and Brazilian music as primary influences.
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I forget what the official name of it was, but they did an all-day of roots music - every kind of music you can imagine from around the country - New Orleans Jazz to Indian flute players, R&B, you name it. I met and became good friends with (blues guitar player) Joe Louis Walker. He was on the show.
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The main thing about the word jazz, is that it's very limiting to what people are doing.
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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.
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The numerous ecstatic traditions - including free jazz and funk - have all been great inspirations.
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This is my favorite combo of musicians. It's one of the finest jazz groups out there. I'm just proud to be in it.
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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.
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I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.
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I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.
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Jazz is America's classical music.
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Make no mistake, this music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen to your Snoop Doggy Dog, Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, but add a little Ellington, Basie and Coltrane to your life as well.
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All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.
