Quotes About Jazz

It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.

We don't live in a jazz world, unfortunately. I think if I had lived in a jazz world, I would have done OK. I'm not sure I would have done great. I'm a lover of jazz music, so I would have been happy, don't get me wrong. I go to jazz concerts like the biggest jazz fan in world. The drag is that I don't play jazz for a living.

I'm a very keen baker; I pride myself on my cakes. I go along the classic sponge line, but I like to jazz it up: I've made some psychedelic birthday cakes.

All the folks I play with come from jazz backgrounds or at least appreciate spontaneity within the parameters of a pop song.

What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

My genre of music is very eclectic. I might play some Latin jazz, or just go into a spontaneous jazz thing. That's the thing about coming to one of my performances. Not every show is the same.

Whatever it is, music should sound spontaneous, I've derived a great deal of pleasure from playing jazz and having the knowledge of that spontaneity.

There's not much in the way of written-down arrangements - just things that Gerry and I have worked out, from playing spontaneously together and hanging on to whatever seems to fall in right.

Esquire, in a July, 1957 issue, has a photograph of me playing the French horn at the Five Spot.

Most people don't know that Congo Square was originally a Muscogee ceremonial ground... in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz.

I think 'Horace Silver' was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of 'Horace Silver.'

Until I was about 16 years old, my dream was to be a musician. I played in rock bands and jazz bands. Then I decided to be an actor and kept the stable career of 'jazz pianist' as my safety net.

Jazz is an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

After Stalin died, the Soviet Union began inching toward the world again. The ban on jazz was lifted. Ernest Hemingway was published; the Pushkin Museum in Moscow hosted an exhibit of the works of Picasso.

I had the house rhythm section at a club called the Sundown in Hartford. Stan Getz came up and played with us.

I've been working on something, just some jazz, relaxed stuff. It will be standard, just piano and voice. It started out as a fun project for me though, I'm still not sure about releasing it.

I look back at Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, and especially Betty Carter, whom I admire the most, and I say, OK, they set a standard of excellence. I listen to them not for what they are doing, but to study where they are coming from because, for me, jazz is life experience.

When I was in eighth standard, I have been dancing since then. I love to dance. Dance has been my life all this while. Then I became a dance instructor. I have learnt jazz, hip-hop, ballet and many other forms.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

Whoever invented smooth jazz, man, I wanna kill 'em: You're turning an art form into a hooker.

I closed my own jazz bar so I could be a man who can write novels as I like. I was pleased about that. This pleasure was connected to the pleasure of writing.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

Jazz is the false liquidation of art — instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.