Quotes About Jazz

My mother would take me to jazz concerts in the park and everybody was smoked out. She gave me the intro and then she forced me to play an instrument to keep me out of trouble.

Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once.

Life is a lot like jazz. It's best when you improvise.

Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.

Gospel music rhythms are not African in origin, although I know that's what the jazz experts say.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That's why I wanted the clarinet.

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.

Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat.

People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music.

Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

They flat their fifths, we drink ours.

If I'm not saying it in four choruses or less, then I'm not saying it.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something thats never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

I don't separate one era of jazz from another, because I listen to everybody... Everybody takes from everybody else and adds their own thing and goes on from there.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

They're not particular whether you're playing a flat 5th or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.

Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk music.

I never thought Jazz was meant to be a museum piece like other dead things once considered artistic.