Quotes About Jazz

My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it.

Every good gospel singer you can hear is a scat singer; they're just using different syllables. There are a lot of jazz singers out there, and more coming out of the churches.

Utah has become my home and I am excited to be able to continue my career playing for the Jazz and the best fans in the NBA.

As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.

I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.

Somerset desperately needs more high-end music making on its doorstep, so the chance to share great music spanning genres as diverse as orchestral classics, trip hop and jazz, in the utterly relaxed and cathartic environment of a Somerset field, is for me the fulfilment of a long-term dream.

Country music as a genre, as an art form, is just as valid out there in the pantheon of the arts as classical, jazz, ballet, whatever.

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

There was a picture of Don Hector on the wall and next to the television was a phonograph with a large collection of cylinders. I looked through them. They were a mixture of old favourites – Dark Side of the Moon, Rumours, Ziggy Stardust – mixed with jazz and a little Puccini.

That is what's important. The life of the line. When I draw, it's like tied and untied writing. My lines can be vivid or dead. The drawing is beautiful if the line is alive. A line is in danger of dying all along. My method of drawing is very much like jazz improvisation. I improvise with the lines and the colors. (...) There's great joy in drawing. Writing is drawing in different apparel, and drawing is another way of writing. And when I draw, I write. Perhaps when I write, I draw.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.

My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.

I turn on the radio. I'm a really big fan of old-fashioned dial radio. I love WNYC and NPR and also 88.3 in New York, which is the jazz station, and it's usually good for background music. If I'm not in New York City or by a traditional radio, I'll stream it on my phone, although I usually try not to look at my phone first thing in the morning.

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.

That's what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.

There's this certain caliber of dancing I was striving for when I was younger, and it's very hard for me to go back and just do it for fun. But I take all other kinds of classes: I take jazz classes, modern classes, and I love doing that instead of going to the gym. The gym is not very much fun.

Jazz has a lot to do with being very present. You know the structure, then you flow through it.

It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.

My great inspiration has always been Studs Terkel, who is a wonderful American oral historian. He was a radio DJ at first, interviewed a lot of jazz musicians, and at some point started to interview Americans about work.

In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

Listen, there's been times in my life like the two years that I only listened to jazz, and probably nothing after 1966. When I went to the Manhattan School of Music, the library didn't have anything after 1966. In order to get good at that, I had to tunnel-vision and focus on that.

It's one of the greatest festivals in the world. New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest is the best all-around... It's an honor to be closing it.