Quotes About Jazz

Are you gonna be my date tonight, or what?" A night of good food, jazz music, and the chance to see Tiana again? Naveen gave her his best smile. "What time to do we leave?

So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.

Sans le jazz, la vie serait une erreur

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.

Whiplash' was just a lucky kind of convergence of events in that I'd been trying to get a bigger project off the ground with no success for a while, and then finally, out of frustration, I just wrote this leaner, meaner, personal script about my experiences as a jazz drummer, and that's the one that wound up getting made.

It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.

When I'm working, I'm pretty busy with that, but when I'm not, yeah, I like to make music. I sing in jazz bars and stuff, and then I mainly paint every day. It's kind of like a different side of my mind I like to use, and it keeps the other one fresh, and yeah, writing, I've been writing with some friends.

I listen to jazz and gospel... yeah that's basically what I listen to.

There's the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.

Jazz has a tradition that has enriched the culture in America. The intellectualism of it does nothing but make you think on a higher level and make you a better person if you engage in the music and let it do what it does when it is played at its highest level.

Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.

I feel like I'm a torchbearer for jazz, fostering its tradition but its future, too.

Even though the music I make gathers influences from all over the place, I feel that the core of what I do comes from the jazz tradition. In terms of improvisation, interaction, feel and overall concept, Jazz is my main source of information and inspiration.

I call myself a singer-songwriter influenced by the gospel and jazz tradition. Naturally, because of my lifestyle and love for nature, there's a lot of folk and Americana there because that's just my life.

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

I knew Charlie Parker, and he gave us such a gift with his music. He put so much into so little space, and it was tragic that he died so young.

You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.

I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.

I wasn't a trained Mickey Mouse club performer. I played in jazz clubs and restaurants.

My dad actually taught me how to play piano. I was classically trained, but I've started to branch off a little bit into blues and jazz. That's my new thing.

I'm a classically trained jazz pianist - I've been playing since I was 3 years old.

Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with.