Jazz Quotes
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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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To hell with the rules. I'm going for the unknown.
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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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Music is interior decoration.
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I haven't a great Jazz band and I don't want one.
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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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Krupa's drums went through us like a triple bourbon.
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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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You can't make jazz without using certain elements of Latin music.
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That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.
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Who knows ... we'll be playing Jazz and having a good time!
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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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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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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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The jazz rhythm won't be understood by the bulk of my audience. That's the problem. We can get away with maybe one tune a night. It depends on where we place it. A song like 'Beyond the Sea,' the fans love that. It's fresh.
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the French write plays and paint as naturally as we play jazz - it's just a national gift.
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Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.
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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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Jazz is restless. It won't stay put & it never will.
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R&B music became gigantic with people like Marvin Gaye and Barry White and Curtis Mayfield who became superstars. We tried to find a place where Jazz belonged because we didn't sell records.
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I don’t know why jazz critics don’t like contemporary jazz. I think a lot of them feel that straightahead jazz has to be championed by them. And I think there’s resentment involved that the kind of music I’m playing will sell more, and has more radio play.
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I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate.
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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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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.
