Jazz Quotes
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Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its origins Classical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.
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[David] Bowie went on to make best-selling music - funk, dance music, electronic music, while also being influenced by cabaret and jazz.
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Jazz, I mean, music will always move, because it can't become stagnant. Because if it becomes stagnant, it's like a river, it'll kill us all. It has to keep moving, music will always flow.
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They flat their fifths, we drink ours.
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I've had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.
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'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music.
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This all came of a conversation I had with [John] Steinbeck once when we were standing in a men's room somewhere. Steinbeck asked me why I didn't play the banjo any more and I told him that went out with the high-button shoes.
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I've been invited to do a trio with a fantastic jazz guitarist and a harmonica player.
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I think all of us begin as writers. I wanted to be a writer from the time I as eight, long before I heard of jazz. The question is, once you have that obsession, what is your subject going to be and you often don't know for some time. It might become fiction, it might be non-fiction, and if it's non-fiction it can go in any number of directions.
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In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me.
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The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.
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As far as piano players are concerned, Oscar Peterson is my very favorite. I also like McCoy Tyner. I think that the big jazz stars, both now and in the past...how shall I say it? These guys are as great as Bach, Beethoven; all of them. People don't know it yet. If jazz survives and is put on a pedestal as an art form, the same as classical music has been through the years, a hundred years from now the kids will know who they were, with that kind of respect.
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Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
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Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music - one type of musician - to another, and to follow that thread in some kind of natural, evolutionary way.
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Paul Desmond sounds like a female alcoholic.
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Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.
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I got my love of jazz from my stepfather, who was a jazz musician.
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Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise... but a way of life.
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Jazz washes away the dust of every day life.
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I don't think of myself as a jazz musician but a medicine man.
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Clouds float in the same pattern only once.
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After me there are no more jazz singers . . . It's a crime that no little singer is back there sockin' it to me in my field. To keep it going, to keep it alive, because I'm not going to live forever.
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I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!
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Jazz was always cool. That was what I liked about jazz - it was always cool. Now I see the cats that were basically cool getting kind of uncool. So that ruins what I feel about jazz.
