Quotes About Jazz

I love playing jazz because I love the freedom you have to improvise. It has given me a feeling in my classical repertoire of creating the atmosphere of the here and now.

I think I represent a more left-wing view of what jazz is.

I knew if I wanted to improvise over chord changes, I'd have to figure out all the scales that went with all those chords.

A major component of jazz is improvisation, which forces you to stay in the moment because you never know what will be coming up. There's a lot of freedom and space available as you improvise around the chord changes.

As I've gotten older, my love for jazz has increased.

I'm not intelligent. I'm not arrogant. I'm just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn't want to become a writer - it just happened.

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

I like to capture the spirit of what the writers intended but find my own nuances. That comes from jazz - the invention and freeness within a structure.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

I was totally into jazz in my teens.

If Miles Davis hadn't died it would have been interesting to do an album with him, but there wasn't much else that would have got me into the studio... although Herbie Hancock has just been in touch about doing something and that would be an interesting combination.

There's a lot of female singers and I don't want to dismiss them, but the male - and I have to be careful - the black male voice in jazz, whatever you say, is an important voice, because there's a tradition of the music that should be touched on, there's a sound that should be touched on.

Someday, I hope to do a jazz club tour.

The economic picture in the States today doesn't allow for jazz concerts in a tour fashion. People now are too used to the Festival, which gives them more names for the same price.

There comes a time when you've toured a ton, and a time to be inspired again. Listen to awesome jazz records that are mellow with no words, and just sit there and read a book, or space out on your couch. And eventually, all that inspiration comes.

There were two things I discovered when I toured with Snoop. One was that the band was all jazz musicians. The second was to instil in me a respect for other styles of music. From then on, whenever I played a new kind of music, I came with the same kind of open mind. What are they trying to do? What are they hearing? How do they see music?

In 1994, I started touring again and I recorded two albums for Chesky Jazz.

New Orleans is a place where people are deliberately undereducated so that they can be a labour class - the economy there is tourism, and one of the only outlets that black males have traditionally been allowed is to play jazz music, y'know?

I'll always work with Stones Throw, but I'm trying to start my own label to release my old material and sign new artists. I want to do everything from rock, to jazz, to electronic, to noise records and movie sound tracks. Both sampled and original music.

I tried to download a jazz album this week and ended up getting some tracks four times, some once, some three times; in total I ended up with 50 tracks. I don't know how I did it.

We listen to a lot of classical and a lot of jazz, and so you get some funky notes here and there. And we get a little experimental in some of the deeper tracks.

Robert Altman made that movie Kansas City about the jazz scene in the city, and we saw that band all together, and that was an amazing show. That's what I got into. I like jazz.

I love jazz music and sad music.