Quotes About Culture

I grew up listening to Bob Marley, Jill Scott, Floetry, Nas, Jay-Z, Beyonce.

But it all came, and for me, hip-hop has done more for racial divide and racial sort of bringing together than anything in the last 30 years. Seeing people like Eminem sounding like somebody like Jay-Z and just the racial aspects of it all.

If we got into a time machine and went back to the 1700s, classical and baroque music would have been the equivalent of Beyonce and Jay-Z.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

I always liked jazz. And my people liked the old blues, race records and the doo-wop and all that.

I'm an advocate of music in schools. It's important to me that music is in as many schools as possible across this country and across the world. I think that it's a lost art form because kids aren't as exposed to it as maybe they used to be, or should be. I was exposed heavily to jazz and that's why I love it.

I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem.

It's always fun to talk about jazz.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

I have been influenced by music. I grew up listening to blues, jazz and all.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

It's something that - jazz is one of the few things that you can go and listen to, I don't care where you're from, what you are, what background you come from - there's something there for you.

I don't want to appear hostile, like I'm hostile to L.A. or that I feel that the people don't appreciate jazz. I don't think it's that. I think it's something more. It's something a little bit more complicated than that.

And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.

I don't know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

Jazz was uplifted by what I did.

I think jazz is good, but I don't enjoy it. It's not for me.

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

I do feel a responsibility because most people like me that are my age or younger, they don't quite make it over to the jazz side. They flirt with it, but they don't quite marry it.

Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn't mean that artists from the rock n' roll/folk-roots culture - of which he was not really a part - shouldn't get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists.

I find early jazz to be the most revolutionary music of its time.

When I was coming up, a lot of serious jazz players couldn't stand funk.