Quotes About Jazz

I don't play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word 'jazz' only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that's fine.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

Jazz is a hard music, and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that's the most important thing.

I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly 'Frankenstein' had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there's one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues.

If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.

My dad had two, sometimes three jobs. Besides running the Commodore Music Shop in Manhattan, he did jazz concerts, and he ran this great jazz label, Commodore.

It was a thrill for me to work with Pete Fountain.

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

So many people report to be contemporary dancers, and they're not. They are sort of jazz dancers that feel like they're throwing a bit of classical in there. I mean, a true contemporary dancer has got ballet as their base and classical ballet, and that is their base. And then they choose to extemporize on that and go into a contemporary world.

I love classical music, but I hated classical guitar. But I like flamenco, because there was something else there going on. It wasn't just the notes being thrown at you. And there were certain kinds of jazz that I really liked and other kinds that just went right over my head.

In every living soul, a spirit cries for expression—perhaps this plaintive, wailing song of Jazz is, after all, the misunderstood utterance of a prayer.

Hannah had no ear for music, she thought, pulling out one of the combs. Of course, no one liked that jazz music, but Hannah ought to know enough to get some good orchestra. Jazz was terrible. Even a radio play was better than that awful boom-boom.

The law don't like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

Dizzy, Duke and Charlie Parker were the greatest jazz legends of all time.

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.

My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well-known blues musicians.

In my opinion, Louis Armstrong is the greatest trumpet stylist of all time and has influenced every trumpet player of his time and long after

You can't compete with Sweets' sound and time feel. It's impossible.

I thought it was time to get a group together and the first person I thought of was Wayne Shorter. I called Wayne and in the meantime, Wayne called me to make an album with him, which was Super Nova.

At a time when individualism is becoming an endangered species, jazz represents a celebration of the individual.

Steve Marcus was one of the greatest saxophonists in all of music. He truly was able to unite jazz with the popular music of the time.

The French - they like jazz, theyve been on jazz a long time.

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart. But at least there had been hearty greetings, man to man; there had been clamorous jazz for dancing, and the lively, slangy catcalls of young people, and the nervous blatting of tremendous traffic.