Quotes About Jazz

I'm playing jazz throughout the song 'Black Sabbath.' That's what it is there. I mean, I'm moving some other things around, but that is forever in there.

Blues and jazz are such a root to music.

Because we grew up in Australia, to find information about a lot of blues guys, I used to go to the library and find the jazz magazines. They didn't even sell them at the time in news agents and stuff.

I'm very fortunate that I really like acting, but it's not all I want to do. I love to sing. I love blues. I love jazz.

I've never been on a board, but I just went on the board for Jazz at Lincoln Center. I'm very happy about that.

I started playing music around 13 or 14, played jazz in high school, and played other stuff in college. After college, I tried to make it as a musician. I lived in a big squalid house full of dudes outside of Boston. We were all musicians. We built this studio in the basement and played there all hours of the day.

I was being ridiculed for going to school... But, you see, I had looked hard at the other musicians and the whole show-business scene... They were doing with jazz musicians what they usually reserved for rock n' roll cats: making them overnight successes, then overnight antiques.

One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

I used to tell my friends, 'Art Blakey is way more gangster than Eazy-E!' I ended up getting my friends into jazz, and all of a sudden there was this little group of kids in the middle of South Central that were all into hard-bop.

The whole point is, give me a break with the standards. You go to the average jazz label and suggest a record and they want to know which standards you're going to play. I'm saying let's break the formula.

When I was playing piano, it was like, 'I'm going to write a song using all the white keys.' My music director, who knew my jazz background, suggested I try big-band music, so we spent a year experimenting with it in concert, and the audience reaction was really good.

I think people psych themselves out before they listen to jazz a lot, thinking that they have to, like, put on a suit or something. That's not what it is.

I had just discovered jazz, and I started singing in a kind of blues cover band at the age of 15. We called ourselves - it was a terrible name - the Blue Zoots. We couldn't actually get our hands on zoot suits, nor did we dress in blue. We did covers of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and kind of Blues Brothers repertoire stuff.

I would love to do a biopic of a famous singer, like Diana Ross or Donna Summer, or an old jazz story that we haven't seen before. I would love to do that! I would love to play Diana Ross 'cause she's an icon. I'm salivating to do that.

I was raised on jazz. My father, from the time I was born, used to get up early on Saturdays and Sundays and put on Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Kenny Burrell, Sarah Vaughn, John Coltrane - all these great, classic albums.

I've sung a whole lot of jazz. It's my favorite style of music to sing. People don't realize it, because they're so accustomed to hearing me sing musical theater.

I went to a Catholic high school, and I was super rebellious. I would dress weird or play jazz. I was definitely pushing against whatever was going on.

Flapper— the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors.

Altijd heb ik die foto van Carole Laure bij me. Een gulzige mond en vochtige ogen (...) Carole Laure in mijn bed. Carole Laure die een heerlijk negermaal voor me bereidt (rijst en kip met kruiden). Carole Laure die naast me zit en met wie ik samen in deze smerige, luizige kamer jazz beluister. Carole Laure als slavin van een neger. Waarom niet? (p.21)

That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from the treatment of it can be jazz.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.

Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

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.