Quotes About Jazz

Souljazz doesn't reinvent soul, jazz or the fusion thereof, but it plays all of the above with the passion that drove its forefathers.

I have a difficult relationship with jazz. My parents really love it, and I went to a school where jazz was considered the best thing ever, so I had to leave it be for a long time. But now I'm rediscovering it. I'm approaching jazz in a different way.

The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation.

Miles Davis is my go-to for music. There's something so relaxing and ambient about it, and it can be a little manic in a good way.

When I first played some Coltrane-type stuff on the 'Pimp a Butterfly' sessions, Kendrick got it immediately. 'I want it to sound like it's on fire,' he'd say. That's the kind of common ground that the best jazz and the best hip-hop have.

I really like Billie Holiday's husky voice, and I'd definitely like to find out more about her.

The song 'Leroy and Lanisha' on my album 'The Epic' is really my homage to 'Linus and Lucy.'

I looked back on the roaring Twenties - with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby,' and the pre-Code films - as a party I had somehow managed to miss. After World War Two, I expected something similar, a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up, I knew we were in big trouble.

In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

It wasn't until I got out of the Army and I heard Coltrane's record 'Coltrane,' when he was doing 'Inch Worm' and 'Out of This World,' that I thought, 'Oh my God, you can do that?' And then I thought, 'OK, I better go back and listen to Eric Dolphy a bit.' And then I said, 'Hmm, I better pull out these Ornette Coleman records.'

The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

There's nothing worse than bad scatting, except maybe bad mouth trumpet. Mouth trumpet may sound like a trumpet, but it's really more like playing a kazoo. The instant you do your solo, the audience has a bit of a chuckle.

What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.

I've mainly been sampling jazz because the tone of the chords are expressive in itself, so it's quite nice to write over. It's got interpretations of a lot of different genres, too, a lot of dubby-ness and experimental stuff.

I have tons of jazz records: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. I could go on and on.

We grew up with musicians coming over jamming. We had tons of instruments. So holidays were always like, 50 people would come over, and there would be a jam session with everyone playing jazz.

Tony Bennett is an iconic jazz legend.

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.

Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

When I play live in restaurants and cafes, I don't play my own stuff. I play jazz and 'American Songbook' standards, and I'll fuse it with top 40.

What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience.

I used to be just a total jazz freak. People used to say, 'Where's the melody? Is there a melody in there anywhere?' Now I let the music follow the song.

The emphasis in each piece is on building a whole, totally integrated structure. In doing this, we try to carry on - in ensemble as well as solo sections - the mood of a jazz soloist. I mean that principle of kinetic improvisation that keeps a jazz solo building.

I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.