Jazz Quotes
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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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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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I feel a lot more secure about the directions I take, than I might have, had I not practiced Buddhism.
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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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The talking shows are like free jazz. I'm just gonna go out there and blow with the idea of keeping it streamlined and not wasting time. It's wild. And it's a great thing when you see a performer really able to.
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I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.
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There's no future without the past and anybody who doesn't really understand where jazz has come from has no right to try to direct where it's going.
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I suppose it was later on that I realized that there was some reaction among the musicians themselves, some of whom resented the success of cool jazz in California, and that broke down into the white guys against the hard-blowing black guys in New York.
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I don't know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.
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I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such.
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I've really gone into business since I got the 6 string, which was like starting all over.
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Nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era from the '20's or bebop from the Swing Era or Avant-garde from Bebop, or Effusion, or on and on and on. So, we don't really know where it's going.
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I'm always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.
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I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.
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I did everything I could to not bring in any of the - any of the technical things I got from classical into jazz. And I did everything to really base it on my speaking voice and to just not try to make it sound pretty.
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When I started doing improvise music in Europe, in the beginning I thought the way that Europeans were interpreting the reconstruction of deconstruction of this thing that we call jazz - of course it's different than what Americans do, because Europeans have a different history, a different sensibility and so forth - the nature of the creative process itself it's the same; but what comes from that creative process is different, because you have a different history, you have a different society, different language.
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As a lover of both hip-hop and jazz, I feel like much of the latter community still doesn't truly embrace hip-hop as a musical extension.
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The law don't like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.
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The economic picture in the States today doesn't allow for jazz concerts in a tour fashion. People now are too used to the Festival, which gives them more names for the same price.
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I think when you love music, you love a lot of it. Now when it comes to jazz, it's very much in the hyperions of height. You go exploring every night.
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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 don't want to sound as if I'm doing something tremendously special. But I am a jazz fan.
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Comedy is the ultimate truth. Jazz is hitting the notes that that no one else would hit, and comedy is saying words that no one else would say.
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Every ‘mistake’ is an opportunity in jazz.
