Quotes About Jazz

I don't know why, but I like the saxophone.

When I was 13, I used to go to a jazz club. The owner of the club became my first business manager. She was very gutsy and had a lot of friends, one of whom happened to be the head of jazz at Columbia at the time. That's how it all began.

If I wasn't in the entertainment industry at all, I would be a miserable human being serving pancakes at Denny's. I'm also a singer, so maybe I'd be singing at dark jazz clubs in Brooklyn.

I'm from New Orleans, which is all about direct engagement out in the street with all the parades and Mardi Gras Indians and jazz funerals. I'm trying to take that and put it into my generation, a group that doesn't have enough joy and celebration in their lives.

My dad's also a musician, so jazz was always around the house. When I was 11, I developed an interest in it, and he took me to Leimert Park. At that time, it was the artistic hub of L.A., and it was right in South Central. The first concert I went to, I saw Pharoah Sanders at the World Stage club there, which only holds, like, 30 people.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

I didn't know what the hell Charlie Parker was playing... I just liked the way he played.

I love guys like Charlie Parker.

I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.

I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven't heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.

As a very small girl, I listened to Charlie Parker and loved him and Max Roach and people like that.

Charlie Parker was a genius, as was Lester Young.

I think cool originates with the jazz culture in the '40s. There was probably cool before that, but that's when people started talking about cool - Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and a bunch of other early, cool jazz folk.

I grew up listening to Ravel, Debussy, Bartok and jazz like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. It was incredibly inspiring! And I was given a guitar and I said 'What the hell is this?!'

It was actually my partner, Bernard Edwards, who helped me develop my sort of funky jazz style.

The static's nice. I could do without the screeching." "Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful . Like old jazz.

As a Juilliard student I would write music by day and by night hear John Coltrane at the Village Vanguard, Miles Davis and Art Blakey at the Café Bohemia, or Thelonious Monk trading sets with the young Ornette Coleman, who was just up from Louisiana playing his white plastic saxophone at the Five Spot at St. Marks Place and the Bowery. Years later, I got to know Ornette.

First to strike a visitor was the raucous music: strident jerking jazz, faster than anything that had gone before; it was the sound of speed. Yet more striking were the dancers: thin young women, diaphanous short skirts showing their legs, their heads crowned with iridescent feathers twitching in time to the music. To those used to Strauss waltzes, these 'flappers' seemed to be suffering from some new nervous disorder.

Berlín. Yo adoraba esta vieja ciudad. Pero eso fue antes de que se mirara en su propio reflejo y le diera por llevar unos corsés tan ajustados que apenas podía respirar. Yo adoraba las filosofías fáciles y despreocupadas, el jazz barato, los cabarés vulgares y todos los demás excesos culturales que caracterizaron los años del Weimar y que hicieron de Berlín una de las ciudades más apasionantes del mundo.

Men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz and tell where it may still be found.

No dictatorship has ever approved of jazz.

In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people.