Quotes About Jazz

My father was a jazz listener, and I think, at least before I was 5, I was not so into that. Although there were records that emphasized percussion that I liked, like Baby Dodds.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

When I played Lady Day, I took Aba onstage with me as a joke. He started singing-in tune!-and the audience loved it.

I know jazz is completely un-American. But the reason why America doesn't like it is because it's not funny. We [americans] have made jazz funny.

That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

There are things I have experienced I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was - is - a one-day street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human.

The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores.

There are things I have experienced that I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

I have a lot of problems with fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams as well. I don't care about instrumental prowess. I don't care about quick-thinking improvisational skill. At all. I'm a songwriter and I'm familiar with Cage and I couldn't really care about what notes people can think of quickly. It doesn't interest me and I'm astounded that it interests other people still. Improvisation is what you do in the process of making something better.

It's hard to explain what happens when jazz and punk fuse with a violin twist but it works. Probably because Anson Choi takes off his shirt while he's playing the saxophone. Whoever's not chatting up a Cadet or a girl from Darling House or playing chess with the guys is watching the band. I turn into a groupie.

And where jazz music was concerned, there was a saying, Segodnia on igraet dzhaz, a zavtra rodinu prodast: Today you play jazz, tomorrow you betray the motherland." Igor,

They were the younger guys playing at the end of the Swing Era, just playing their version of it. It became known as bebop, which sounds esoteric, but it was really just an offshoot of swing music." That offshoot, however, almost instantly changed jazz music's identity, advancing it from a danceable idiom played with the audience's casual listening pleasure in mind to a more personal and cerebral modern music.

the way as the performances enhance and even change the original idea. This is not "improvisation," this is like jazz: composition-in-the-moment.

I like to say, jazz music is kind of like my musical equivalent of comfort food. You know, it's always where I go back to when I just want to feel sort of grounded.

You hear jazz. How music sounds piercing your mind and thinking. Jazz is an energy that dissolves your brain and throws your thoughts into the abyss. As if the cigarette smoke is all that remains of our thoughts that burn out in us. This is the mood of the soul. This is the silence of the city and the romance of life.

Lucky settled on an NPR-type station that played jazz—not New Orleans–type jazz, but the other kind, you know, New York type or something where you get the feeling that everybody playing an instrument went to college someplace fancy and studied music until they just about ruined all their natural instincts.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

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

Trust me, the only real way to understand 'Chic' is in highfalutin terms. Our chord progressions were based on European modal melodies. I made those early 'Chic' records to impress my jazz friends.

I wasn't very aware of pop music because I attended an arts school. For me, it was all about jazz.

It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers.

Pythagoras felt that specific notes affected people to very minute gradations of feeling. And every songwriter, I think, knows that D is a great key for a long song. It just happens to work. And B flat is always a great jump key for jazz. ~ Janis Ian