Quotes About Jazz

Good jazz has been a big part of my life as far as my interest in music, and... It's kind of weird now with music, the way technology is, with downloading and iPods and electronic distribution, and its kind of - you miss something, I think.

I went to school for engineering, I studied jazz. So I always had this kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York.

I've always gravitated toward technical music in general. I love jazz fusion.

I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn't interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.

A lot of us have classical and jazz training, and it would be hard for us to work with a hip-hop artist who doesn't know a lot about the technical aspects of music. But when you listen to Wyclef's records, you hear bridges, chord changes and real structure. You can tell he has big ears.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

I loved Art Tatum! And, through him, and other different jazz musicians, I actually found my technique.

When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.

I made a good living for a teenager. And I had to learn all different kinds of music - jazz, swing, Motown, pop - and that inspired what kind of music I started to write.

I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.

I actually had a really nice guitar as a teenager. I took jazz guitar, so my mom bought me this probably $1,600 guitar. But I got really into garage rock and local bands, and I noticed they played really crappy guitars. So I thought, 'Hey, I should get a crappy guitar, too!'

When it's all said and done, jazz with a capital J is where I'm coming from. Dexter Gordon, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk - that's what I really studied when I was a teenager and what really fueled my passion.

By the time I was in my teens, I was listening to Delta blues and jazz.

Even though I'm a jazz-trained drummer, I cut my teeth playing rock.

The podcast 'A History of Jazz' began telling its story in February - 100 years after the recording of 'Livery Stable Blues' by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the start of jazz as a legitimate branch of music.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Hamp would ask me about tempos in the band: 'Jacquet,' he'd say, 'knock off that tempo.' A lot of jazz musicians didn't prefer to play for dancers, which was their loss, really. But good jazz has always had that dance feel.

So how can you say Jazz started in whorehouses when the musicianers didn't have no real need for them?

One suspects that the haste with which some performers and some writers brush aside the traditional-jazz renaissance reflects their understanding of the devastating effect that an insistence on the traditional values would have upon the world of modern jazz to which they belong

Now for me, music is indeed a spiritual experience. It may be hypnotizing or violently stimulating. I listen to and appreciate all kinds of music, from folk, to jazz, to classical, to hard core rock.

Thelonious Monk's music is essentially about freedom.

He took comfort in the neon signs, the wild strands of jazz creeping out of clubs whenever happy swells of people pushed through the doors in their finery.

I don't get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.

The bar lights glittered on the wet pavement, and jazz wailed out of the open doors of the bars, collinding with the more discordant, driving beats coming from the strip joints, where bored-looking dancers, both male and female, gyrated their hips and humped poles and pretended to be sexy.