Quotes About Jazz

When I joined the trio, it was as if I was capable of driving a sports car at 60, but Ray Brown and Oscar Peterson just kept pressing the pedal down, and I was trying to control the car at 80!

Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing

The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

Young, socially liberal women whom society called flappers and their male counterparts, labeled sheiks, crowded the cabarets where jazz was performed.

Amsterdam must have more than a million people. But the only area where jazz is really profitable and successful in an economic sense is in Japan. That's because they haven't been exposed enough.

Well, I had started a program which is even longer running than this one in 1967 which was a jazz program called The Best of Jazz and that still goes out on Monday nights. That's been going for 33 years or something.

I didn't like progressive jazz or anything. Rock was something I like to listen to.

So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.

I've played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I've been fortunate enough to play with them, a who's who. All of those guys, I've been fortunate enough to have performed with.

I always leaned toward free jazz... experimental jazz and progressive jazz. I feel like jazz is just part of the flavor and palette that you have as a musician to experiment with.

You know, as kids were weren't jazz musicians or anything. But, the circle of friends and the neighborhood I lived in, we were really big Rush freaks and Yes fans. We would listen to 'Close to the Edge' and 'Hemispheres' and '2112' - the more artsy, progressive stuff. Some of the guys were into King Crimson and Genesis and all that.

If we have to put music into baskets, then the progressive rock bands I fell in love with as a teenager made sounds that shaded into jazz, folk, metal, and in the case of the wonderful (and sadly missed) Jon Lord, modern classical music.

The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. . . .

and will I like being called a jazz baby? --You will love it.

Ragtime was a fanfare for the 20th century.

For some reason at 12 or 13, I just heard Gerry Milligan and fell in love with that, whatever it was called.

The whole point of Louis Armstrong is that no one can really figure him out. There was a while where I thought you could try.

My favorite singer is Ella Fitzgerald.

Thank God for jazz. It gave black women what film and theater gave white women: a well-lighted space where they could play with roles and styles, conduct esthetic experiments and win money and praise.