Jazz Quotes
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Paul Desmond sounds like a female alcoholic.
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You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.
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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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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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It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.
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The people know more about [Jazz] in other countries than in America. America is the last country to know about anything, because we're too fat, we have too much of everything, you understand? And we do not listen.
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I don't think of myself as a jazz musician but a medicine man.
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I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre.
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Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.
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Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world.
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I find as much inspiration from the forerunners of jazz as I do the modern-day innovators of jazz.
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The jazz always seems to automatically come out, because it was from my jazz days that I learned that spark. And the nice thing with my band and this repertoire, which is a complete joy, is that we go beyond just playing chords and melody. It is music that can stretch out.
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It's just music. It's trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes. The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it. It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible.
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You can't make jazz without using certain elements of Latin music.
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Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
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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.
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Krupa's drums went through us like a triple bourbon.
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I like to know for whom I'm writing - it makes the composition easier to do.
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Brubeck, for instance, is not careless. He's a studied guy. And even if his picture ends up on the back cover of Life, he's still a studious guy.
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Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties.
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There’s good and bad music in all genres. I would be the first one to admit that if you’re listening to some of the smooth-jazz radio stations, a lot of that music is boring. But not all of it is. And if I’m listening to a straight-ahead jazz station, not all of that is emotionally compelling either.
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We were jazz musicians in the early days. But as soon as we brought in the DJ, the shows turned from people sitting down to dancing.
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Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.
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Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.
