Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

There was no control except the "mood of his power... and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes-- then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Boldon broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head.

There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomach in a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in the darkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.

The static’s nice. I could do without the screeching.” “Are you kidding? That’s the music of the spheres, commissar. It’s beautiful. Like old jazz.

The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o’clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus years non stop, just get up out of his sick bed, crawl up on the bandstand and play, the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all of these people give their lives for this, and they did give their lives, is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there’s just nothing else you’re going to taste that’s as sweet.

This notion of rest, it’s attractive to her, but I don’t think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn’t like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor mornings free of flies and heat when the light is shy. No. Not at all. They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don’t know where from.

They call it music, but it's just this side of magic.

They had a table near the rail round the huge floor. Bond was spellbound. He found many of the girls very beautiful. The music hammered its way into his pulse until he almost forgot what he was there for.

Those people obviously don't know who I think I am.

The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit... I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it... I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before... The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That's where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started... In my mind I have always believed and thought since then that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame.

Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation.

To me, Southside was as big as heaven. And heaven, as I envisioned it, had to be a place full of jazz.

Toca el jazz; no hay melodía, sólo notas, una miríada de breves sacudidas. No conocen reposo; un orden inflexible las genera y destruye; sin dejarles nunca tiempo para recobrarse, para existir por sí. Corren, se apiñan, me dan al pasar un golpe seco y se aniquilan. Me gustaría retenerlas, pero sé que si llegara a detener una, sólo quedaría entre mis dedos un sonido canallesco y languideciente. Tengo que aceptar su muerte; hasta debo querer esta muerte; conozco pocas impresiones más ásperas o más fuertes.

Tongue and hand tied, I was equally cut off and trapped in my own silent dark tomb.

Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape somewhere. Well, none of the musicians have played together. You can’t play jazz music that way. In order for you to play jazz, you’ve got to listen to them. The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking and for you to interact with them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out. And that’s how our music really could teach what the meaning of American democracy is.

Turn it," Thomas said, without smiling. "Play it again.

T was in a blue mood , his open reflections on the isloation of his life floating like Jazz notes under a "pink moon

Twist a tongue, and tongue a twist how many twists can a tongue twister twist around their twisting tongue. If a tongue twister's tongue could twist, how many twists would the tongue twister's tongue twist while their tongue was a twisting.

When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.

When stealing from other players, an older musician wisely advised me, choose a different instrument from your own, and people won’t notice the theft.

Welcome to Book-a-holic Anonymous. Hi, I'm Jazz and I am addicted to the written word. I love the smell of the blackest ink sliding across texture paper. My eyes squint against the loss of time within the pages of story. I don't think there's a cure for my compulsion to lose myself within life and times of those characters bound between the covers.

We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don’t just say I’m grown and ought to know. I don’t. I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want… well, I didn’t always… now I want. I want some fat in this life.” “Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it.” “You don’t know either, do you?” “I know enough to know how to behave.” “Is that it? Is that all it is?” “Is that all what is?” “Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?” “Oh, Mama.” Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth. Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn’t do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking? - Violet Trace and Alice Manfred

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

Widening blood puddles spilled from suffocating death wounds.

You hear lots of notes, don’t you? Some have a major sound. Some have a minor sound. But there’s not one blue note among all these black and white keys. The real blues, the soul of the sound, comes from the spaces in-between.

After two takes you're imitating yourself.

You play me with your jazz & leave me with the blues.

Your idea of romance requires a corset and a time machine.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

A friend told me he'd risen above jazz. I leave him there.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

A genius is the one most like himself.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He's above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.

All bad jazz sounds like Woody Woodpecker.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.

An artist can only be evaluated after he's dead. At the 11th hour he might do something that will eclipse everything else.

All music is beautiful.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

All them weird chords which don't mean a thing...you got no melody to remember, and no beat to dance to

Always pack your uniform on top.

All the music you've ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head. I don't reject that, I use it.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.

And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.

Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

Are you stalking me, Mr. Fulton?" The idea both amused and horrified Jazz.