Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

What kills me is that everybody thinks I like Jazz.

What separates great jazz musicians from average ones is Taste. Those who have taste consistently choose notes, tempos, timbres and voicings that seduce and satisfy attentive listeners.

What was the competition? Well, I remember this Puerto Rican who came out in a short skirt and a gun.

What we hear is the quality of our listening.

Whenever society gets too stifling and the rules too complex, there's some sort of musical explosion.

Whenever there's a change with Jazz & its aesthetics, it's almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

When I discovered Mose Allison I felt I had discovered the missing link between jazz and blues

When I got pretty good I went on the road with a group. We starved.

When I hear the words jazz pianist, that just means I have the skills to do most things. Because to be a jazz pianist, even to be a bad jazz pianist, you have to be pretty good.

When I joined the band I didn't know any of the tunes, and when I left the band I didn't know any of the tunes!

When I sort of step in my jazz world, it's somewhere between instrumental jazz and vocal jazz.

When rock music came in, I wasn't bitter about it. I was puzzled.

When I was doing jazz concerts in America, I would use the biggest names I could find.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition.

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can't not be a musician.

When you sing, always tell the truth.

When you're dead, you're done.

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

Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.

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.

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 blows who you is.

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

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.

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

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

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

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about 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 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 the rules. No jazz before a rumble.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.