Quotes About Jazz

A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?

I didn't arrive on the scene until after Jaco Pastorius had passed, but 'Three Views of a Secret' is a long-time favourite of mine.

I had not been in the jazz environment, having been brought up in the church. But once I got to New York, and I was signed to perform at The Village Gate and the Vanguard and clubs like that, and these - the Vanguard was one of the most elite, if not the most elite, jazz club out there.

I go for a nice walk in my neighborhood and search for vinyl, old jazz, classics. Then I go home and listen to them.

My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising.

A composition can include an element of improvisation as one of its layers. But jazz improvisation is based on specific codes, which don't allow the possibility to construct multiple layers, to put together different words, to have different rhetorical gestures intact.

The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

As my career has progressed, I've had the pleasure of playing with the baddest jazz cats on the planet. But that doesn't change my desire to entertain folks. That's really who I am.

The way I evolved was playing straight-ahead jazz into playing more fusion-type stuff just because I was young enough to get into it. As I get older, I find myself coming back to where I kind of started.

I love, you know, a lot of jazz, John Coltrane.

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.

He said jazz music was invented by the first generation out of slavery. I thought that was beautiful because, while it is music, it is very hard to put on paper; it is so much more a language of the soul. It is as if the soul is saying something, something about freedom.

I thought that was beautiful because, while it is music, it is very hard to put on paper; it is so much more a language of the soul. It is as if the soul is saying something, something about freedom. I think Christian spirituality is like jazz music. I think loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper. But it is no less real, no less meaningful, no less beautiful.

Not long after we started working for him I asked Bernard if he thought Thatcher was evil,'I said. 'He said it was like asking what jazz is.

Para começar, tocava saxofone soprano, um instrumento raro no jazz ainda hoje. (Por favor, se você lembrou do Kenny G, pare de ler imediatamente.)

Another thing I said to Caliban the other day-we were listening to Jazz- I said, don't you just dig this? And he says, in the garden. I said he was so square he was hardly credible. Oh, that, he said. Like rain, endless dreary rain. Color-killing.

And who knows? Those people might have much better things to do than to loiter about Levy Pants, such as composing jazz or creating new dances or doing whatever those things are that they do with such facility.

If income was directly proportional to technical proficiency and education, classical and jazz musicians would be some of the most affluent people in the world.

But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, theres a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression thats possible with the instrument.

I really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.

I think the challenges for me was to go into the studio with these incredible jazz players and come up to their level of excellence. That's always a challenge.

In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I'm very much a jazz poet.

I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.