Quotes About Jazz

and jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in

y así va el mundo y el jazz es como un pájaro que migra o emigra o inmigra o transmigra, saltabarreras, burlaaduanas, algo que corre y se difunde...

My ex calls the ochre winter 'autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.— Broken Verses

Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life.

I grew up with music in the house. I was told I could sing as soon as I started talking. Everybody in my family sang, always lots of records, blues and jazz and soul, R&B, you know, like Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Coltrane, that kind of thing.

A lot of times, we look at jazz in eras. How can we not keep those eras separate and think of the language as one complete continuum? It's all interrelated, and it's all evolutionary.

Lately I've been listening to some classical music again, some jazz.

Many people don't understand how disciplined you have to be to play jazz... And that is really the idea of democracy - freedom within the Constitution or discipline. You don't just get out there and do anything you want.

I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.

Everything we did, we did live - and then Bobby took it home and chopped it up and edited it. Which is pretty much what they did with every jazz record you've ever heard.

I'm an advocate of music in schools. It's important to me that music is in as many schools as possible across this country and across the world. I think that it's a lost art form because kids aren't as exposed to it as maybe they used to be, or should be. I was exposed heavily to jazz and that's why I love it.

In the Bay Area, there was a resurgence of Dixieland jazz in the '40s - there was the Frisco Jazz Band, and Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band.

I want to expand jazz; I don't want to keep the audience limited. I want to reach people who have never come to a jazz concert before. One way to do that is by making records that have a lot of different kinds of music on them.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

I never liked jazz or anything else. Early rock n' roll - that was music to me. Everything else was boring.

Grover Washington was my main influence, and when I went to college, I started listening to more of the jazz masters like Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane.

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.

My music is jazz.

It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.

I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem.

I don't know how much more what I've done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There've been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.

Artie Shaw was way ahead of most clarinetists and most jazz players.

I'm this strange kind of fusion of jazz, pop, and R&B.