Quotes About Jazz

You could play probably a span of 50 years of me playing St. Louis Blues, and most of the time it will be different every time.

When Bird came on the scene, it was just as shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark, and then the light appeared for the first time.

New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.

Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night.

A lot of jazz is like that; it sells over a period of time.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.

The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons.

Dennis asked, "Do you enjoy jazz? Because I love it, and I know of a place downtown where we could go." "And then we can have broken glass and arsenic for dinner!" I felt like replying, because I barely tolerated jazz when I encountered it in elevators or dental offices. But I considered that when you meet somebody who really loves something, the high-road thing to do is to try to love it, too, so I wrote back, "That sounds great!

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

The jazz I love is sweet and pure with raw elements, which is exactly what the good hip-hop is doing now.

I also met, early on Ella Fitzgerald. Her songbooks are some of the most amazing bodies of work.

Playing jazz is an art that is absorbed through intense listening, focused imitation, and fearless experimentation. The jazz masters learned on the bandstand. Literally.

In an interview with Charlie Parker, another jazz saxophone legend, Paul Desmond, asked Parker if his fantastic ability came as a result of practice, or from performing a lot. Parker said, I can't see where there's anything fantastic about it at all. I put quite a bit of study into the horn, that's true…. I used to put in at least from 11 to 15 hours a day…over three or four years.[1]

He was a hip cat a hep cat a cool cat a bad mad rad cat Oobie-do John the Sax Man Scat Man the long sleek cat man!!

If you met my dad, I think a lot of things would be put to rest. Because my pops is a pretty silly guy. But, Coldcut, they're based in the U.K. I'm a big fan of jazz music, so American music has had a big influence on what I listen to.

There's a destination,a little up the road. From the habitations and the towns we know. A place we saw the lights turn low. The jig-saw jazz and the get-fresh flow

Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that' Dizzy Gillespie

The rest of the band faded down to almost nothing while my dad did his best Bill Evans impression — except hopefully without the untreated hepatitis.

You can't die of jazz," said Dr. Walid. "Can you?" I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age. "You know," I said, "I think you'll find you can." Jazz

My father always swore that jazz, like the blues, was born in the muddy water of the Mississippi. My mother swore that it came from the bottle, like all the devil's best work.

People often ask me if it's scary to make up a song onstage, dictating parts, on the fly, to a full orchestra. Well, no. It doesn't occur to me to worry about that. I have a jazz musician's view of mistakes. If you play a wrong note, you can always make the same mistake again on purpose and make it sound right. Insistence on the mistake can be quite musical. Indeed, "once is a mistake, twice is jazz," a quote often attributed to Miles Davis.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical.