Jazz Quotes
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The reason New Orleans is still around is because of the celebrations it has inspired since its inception as a city. I'm always excited about the possibility of what might happen. That's what drives us, and I think that's the spirit of New Orleans and the spirit of jazz.
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I will never again play anything that does not have social significance. We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we are master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we've been through.
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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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In the year of 1902, when I was about seventeen years old, I happened to invade one of the sections [in New Orleans] where the birth of Jazz originated from.
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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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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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If I'm going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.
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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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Ted Lewis could make the clarinet talk. What it said was put me back in the case!
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I got my love of jazz from my stepfather, who was a jazz musician.
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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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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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If it comes out sounding like Dixieland jazz or classical or punk or rock or even slightly metal, that's because that's where I'm going to find inspiration.
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Music is interior decoration.
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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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Jazz washes away the dust of every day life.
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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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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 had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.
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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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It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.
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To hell with the rules. I'm going for the unknown.
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I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!
