Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music - you can't do that in jazz. You can't do that with classical.

Working with Monk is like falling down a dark elevator shaft.

Yes, I have been studying piano since I was six. Classical, jazz, compositional, Broadway, everything. I just love it all.

You blows who you is.

You always come back to Duke Ellington - he's kind of like the thread that holds everything together from the big band descending to lots of jazz, actually.

You can't teach it [jazz singing]. There's nobody who can teach you how to sing jazz. Either you know how to sing jazz, or you don't.

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.

You can't make jazz without using certain elements of Latin music.

You gotta have a dream. If you don't have a dream, how you gonna make a dream come true?

You don't have to live the blues to play the blues.

You don't know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything.

You have to be born with it. You can't even buy it. If you could buy it, they'd have it at the next Newport Festival.

You have to enjoy playing. The old-timers did, and that's one reason why their music is a lasting music. I feel that I play jazz to entertain the listener, and you just can't do that unless you yourself are entertained at the same time.

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!

You have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the Blues.

You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it.

You know I want to sing for people, I want to jazz people up I want to make new music that they've never heard.

You know why I quit playing ballads? Cause I love playing ballads.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

You know, somebody mentioned that I was sort of a jazz-pop singer. And I'm thrilled that somebody would find that, at last, in my presentation, because it's such a part of where I live.

You know the rules. No jazz before a rumble.

A mistake is the most beautiful thing in the world. It is the only way you can get to some place you’ve never been before. I try to make as many as I can. Making a mistake is the only way that you can grow.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

You've got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines—well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads—that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco—the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.

American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.

And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today-jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock and roll, hip hop and on and on- is derived from the blues.

Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city’s most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre and Montparnasse, respectively the Right and Left Bank haunts of artists, intellectuals, poets, and musicians since the late nineteenth century. Performing in these high-profile and popular entertainment districts could give an advantage to jazz musicians because Parisians and tourists already knew to go there when they wanted to spend a night out on the town. As hubs of artistic imagination and experimentation, Montmartre and Montparnasse therefore attracted the kinds of audiences that might appreciate the new and thrilling sounds of jazz. For many listeners, these locations leant the music something of their own exciting aura, and the early success of jazz in Paris probably had at least as much to do with musicians playing there as did other factors. In spite of their similarities, however, by the 1920s these neighborhoods were on two very different paths, each representing competing visions of what France could become after the war. And the reactions to jazz in each place became important markers of the difference between the two areas and visions. Montmartre was legendary as the late-nineteenth-century capital of “bohemian Paris,” where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on flying in the face of respectable middle-class values. But by the 1920s, Montmartre represented an established artistic tradition, not the challenge to bourgeois life that it had been at the fin de siècle. Entertainment culture was rapidly changing both in substance and style in the postwar era, and a desire for new sounds, including foreign music and exotic art, was quickly replacing the love for the cabarets’ French chansons. Jazz was not entirely to blame for such changes, of course. Commercial pressures, especially the rapidly growing tourist trade, eroded the popularity of old Montmartre cabarets, which were not always able to compete with the newer music halls and dance halls. Yet jazz bore much of the criticism from those who saw the changes in Montmartre as the death of French popular entertainment. Montparnasse, on the other hand, was the face of a modern Paris. It was the international crossroads where an ever changing mixture of people celebrated, rather than lamented, cosmopolitanism and exoticism in all its forms, especially in jazz bands. These different attitudes within the entertainment districts and their institutions reflected the impact of the broader trends at work in Paris—the influx of foreign populations, for example, or the advent of cars and electricity on city streets as indicators of modern technology—and the possible consequences for French culture. Jazz was at the confluence of these trends, and it became a convenient symbol for the struggle they represented.

Black women were armed, black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose.

A primera la hora de la tarde, las calles de Puenteviejo bullían de actividad y de sonidos. Por encima de los gritos, por encima del ruido de los motores y de las máquinas de la constructora Collins Corp que copaba casi todas las obras de Horizonte, el sonido de un saxo voluptuoso acariciaba a los viandantes. Alguien tocaba escondido entre las estatuas de la plaza Mussart y su música alcanzaba todos los rincones del barrio.

A psychic friend could come in very handy." I reshuffled my cards. "I predict I will," she said.

A real musician ain’t gonna choose his own guitar like an evil master choosing his slave. The guitar will choose his master and when he does, you’ll know it.

Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both.

Art speaks a language that my soul comprehends When I slip into a dark place and I can’t go on – I hide in the arms of Jazz for a while – for nourishment, refreshment and inspiration.

Billie Holiday Her imperfect life led to her becoming a legendary performer with a continuing influence on American music. Born Eleanora Fagan on April 7, 1015 she became a songwriter and jazz singer with an unmistakable vocal style. Although she had a limited range her delivery, tempo and natural skills, held the attention of a devoted following. Influenced by Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith her success as a pop singer with the Benny Goodman Band started with "Riffin' the Scotch", which sold 5,000 copies. She continued with Count Basie and Artie Shaw and was recognized throughout the 1930s and the 1940s with songs such as “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm,” “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and “God Bless the Child.” Plagued with abusive relationships, drug and alcohol addiction, and even a short prison sentence she still rose to the top of the charts. Her predictable deterioration and eventual death on July 17, 1959 was caused by cirrholis of the liver.

An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time

Baku is a jazz city; it's an experience that evokes the old Baku.

But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]

By the way, this tells you why Auto-Tuned vocals on many contemporary records sound so shallow and lifeless. It’s almost as if everything we learned from African American music during the twentieth century was thrown out the window by technologies in the twenty-first century. The goal should not be to sing every note dead center in the middle of the pitch---we escaped from that musical prison a hundred years ago. Why go back? In an odd sort of way, much of contemporary pop music resembles opera, with all the subtle shadings of bent notes and microtonal alterations abandoned in the quest for mathematically pure tones.

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

Did Bach ever eat pancakes at midnight?

Crisi Esistenziale” - (Testo e Musica : Savio De Martino) CHI SONO IO PER SENTIRMI UN DIO, E CHI SEI TU PER DECIDERE, CHI SIAMO NOI NON LO SAPREMO MAI, MA CERTO STA’ CHE NON SIAMO EROI, IL MONDO VA’ CONSUMANDOSI, LA TERRA E’ ORMAI FUOCO E CENERE, LA GIOVENTU’ NON LAVORA PIU’, L’ECONOMIA NON PRODUCE.. RIT. FERMATI, NON COMMETTERE ALTRI DANNI, BASTA METTERSI NEI PANNI, DI CHI HA PERSO OGNI RAGIONE, E VORREBBE QUALCOSA DI PIU’, RITROVANDO QUEI VALORI, QUI SI MUORE PER UN NIENTE, TUTTI SANNO MA SI MENTE, E LA GENTE NON CE LA FA’ PIU’… A PAGARE GLI ERRORI DI CHISSA’, A PARLARE DI COSE CHE NON SA’, NON C’E’ PIU’ SENSO DI DOVERE E SENSO DI MORALITA’, NON C’E’ VITA CHE POSSA TOGLIERE IL DIRITTO DI VIVERE PERCHE’, OGNI ANIMA E’ UN DONO E VA VISSUTA E UN’OPPORTUNITA’.. CHI SONO IO FRA MILIARDI NOI, SEMBRIAMO ORMAI SOLO NUMERI, E CHI SEI TU CHE HAI SETE DI POTERE, CHE PENSI DI DOVER COMANDARE, E NON E’ MAI TARDI PER CAMBIARE, LA LIBERTA’ STA ANCHE NELLO SPERARE, IL MONDO E’ LIBERO DI AMARE, E LO SI FA’ SENZA GUERRE.. RIT. FERMATI, NON COMMETTERE ALTRI DANNI, BASTA METTERSI NEI PANNI, DI CHI HA PERSO OGNI RAGIONE, E VORREBBE QUALCOSA DI PIU’, RITROVANDO QUEI VALORI, QUI SI MUORE PER UN NIENTE, TUTTI SANNO MA SI MENTE, E LA GENTE NON CE LA FA’ PIU’… NON CE LA FA PIU’… NOI SIAMO UNA GENERAZIONE, CHE NON SA’ PIU’ DOVE ANDARE, COLPA DI UNA CONFUSIONE, CHE CI PORTA A SBAGLIARE QUI C’E’… CRISI ESISTENZIALE..CRISI ESISTENZIALE..CRISI ESISTENZIALE…!

Determined to enshroud his enchantment.

(...) después el abuelo ponía el disco de uno que tocaba la trompeta y se entusiasmaba, se acariciaba sus bigotes blancos siguiendo el ritmo, escucha a este músico, decía, escucha cómo hace latir la vida en su trompeta, la vida es aliento, muchachito, en principio era el verbo, y los curas quién sabe lo que se han creído, pero el verbo es aliento, muchachito, nada más que aliento... en la vida hay que amar la vida, y a ti tiene que gustarte siempre la vida, recuérdalo, la muerte les gusta a los fascistas...

(...)"Flapper"— the notorious character type who bobbed her hair, smoked cigarettes, drank gin, sported short skirts, and passed her evenings in steamy jazz clubs, where she danced in a shockingly immodest fashion with a revolving cast of male suitors.

Every bloody mark had assassinated my writing along the way.

Everywhere was the atmosphere of a long debauch that had to end; the orchestras played too fast, the stakes were too high at the gambling tables, the players were so empty, so tired, secretly hoping to vanish together into sleep and ... maybe wake on a very distant morning and hear nothing, whatever, no shouting or crooning, find all things changed.

Don't make a career out of underestimating me." — Claire de Haven

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost memories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreams play when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

Food is merely a platform for condiments.