Quotes About Jazz

Flights are a good way to catch up on podcasts, but I'll listen to some jazz to fall asleep.

I might sound like the weird artist hippy girl or whatever, but I don't have a complaint about what jazz is or what I'm doing with music. And that's more of a philosophy on my life. I could find things that maybe could shift or change, but ultimately, it's like that's not a good way to live our lives and think about what we do.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.

Jazz scares me. I've witnessed so many incredible singers and jazz musicians. Pop and soul music have always been the things that I felt like I could do.

When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. I called it 'Excursion on a Wobbly Rail,' after a Cecil Taylor song. I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played.

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant. I think even Adorno's fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz.

Names and theoretical things don't occur to me. If they do, I'm not doing my real playing mode.

Being jazz-trained, things happen spontaneously. Even though it's funk rock, we still have the instincts of a jazz musician.

Well, I tell you... the first chorus, I plays the melody. The second chorus, I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus, I routines.

The summer before my third year of law school, I worked at a law firm in Washington, D.C. I turned 25 that July, and on my birthday, my father happened to be playing in a local jazz club called Pigfoot and invited me to join him. I hadn't spent a birthday with him since I was 3, but I agreed.

And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.

There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.

I had a very thorough grounding in music; I'd grown up around songs. My parents listened to a lot of music. My dad was majorly into jazz, which was absolutely a big influence on me, even if it was more subconsciously as a kid.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a Jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Here in England we live at a slower pace, have more time to enjoy things - like good jazz.

I fear that I won't get better and that I won't have time to practice. To be called a "jazz musician" - it's a big responsibility.

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

Louis Armstrong said you have to live a life. And that's right. If you don't live a life, you don't got nothin' to come out your horn.

I missed jazz, kind of. And by the time I came to it in life, it was too intimidating to enjoy thoroughly.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

Count Basie isn't just a man, or even just a band. He's a way of life.

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.