Jazz Music Quotes - Page 11

• Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.

  Roy Haynes

  Music, Jazz, Vocalist

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• At first I didn't understand what [Thelonious Monk] was doing, but I went back again, and what I can say about Monk is that I heard ancient Africa in his music. When he played, it was like a ballet. He captured the sound of the universe. Monk could take a triad, a simple chord, and make it sound dissonant. I'm sure that element he had in his piano was part of the two years he spent traveling with his mother in gospel music in the tent shows.

  Randy Weston

  Music, Mother, Simple

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• There's no appreciation for the giants [of jazz]; there's never been a major film on Duke Ellington , never a major film on Louis Armstrong. What they accomplished, we could never accomplish today...What's happening now is lightweight compared to what happened before. If Louis Armstrong was alive today, he'd be a superstar. If Art Tatum was alive today, my god, all the piano players would get on their knees. So that's what's missing today; we've been cut off from our heritage.

  Randy Weston

  Music, Appreciation, Art

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• I am an improviser, ... I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

  Joe Zawinul

  Music, Writing, May

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• I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to listen to it.

  Artie Shaw

  Thinking, Band, Jazz

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• Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.

  Evan Parker

  Air, People, Musical

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• Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

  Colin Greenwood

  Musician, Groups, Tools

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• 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.

  Herbie Hancock

  Parent, Musician, Dinner

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• I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded.

  Molly Ringwald

  Appreciation, Dad, Passion

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• I really love jazz, but I will never be a jazz musician as much as I dream. But, I think that the jazz music I love is there in my music.

  Laura Mvula

  Dream, Love Is, Thinking

  "Meet Our Latest Music Crush: Laura Mvula". Interview with Lauren Levinson, www.elle.com. March 28, 2013.

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• If I knew what it was going to look like, I wouldnt be so excited to be a part of it. Jazz is a music of surprise; its a music of spontaneity. I think jazz musicians live--I know I do--for being surprised and not knowing whats going to come next.

  Joshua Redman

  Thinking, Knowing, Musician

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• And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it.

  DJ Jazzy Jeff

  Jazz Improvisation, How You Feel, Music Is

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• I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about Jazz.

  Pat Metheny

  Music, Worry, Principles

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• A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.

  Charlie Trotter

  Food, Together, Musician

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• Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk

  John Lewis

  Music, Innovation, Dizzy

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• I think that's what really a substantial work is, it's forever. It's the truth now and it was the truth then, and it will be the truth tomorrow.

  Abbey Lincoln

  Music, Thinking, Forever

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• I was in New York, miserable because I was working supper clubs but I wasn't expressing myself. I was really unhappy with my life. I saw Max Roach again and he told me I didn't have to do things like that. He made me an honest woman on the stage. I have been performing in that tradition since. I feel that I'm a serious performer now whereas then I wanted to be but I didn't know how.

  Abbey Lincoln

  Music, New York, Unhappy

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• I never really sounded like Bird, but that was my mission. I didn't care if people said that I copied him; I loved Bird's playing so much. But Mingus was the one that really pushed me away from the idea and forced me into thinking about having an individual sound and concept. That's what I got from Mingus.

  Jackie McLean

  Music, Thinking, Ideas

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• I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.

  Sonny Rollins

  Music, Moving, Jazz

  "Sonny Rollins: 'You Can't Think And Play At The Same Time'". "All Things Considered" with Arun Rath, www.npr.org. May 3, 2014.

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• What makes bebop legitimate is the fact that when it was done, it was illegitimate.

  Matthew Shipp

  Music, Bebop, Done

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• Thelonious Sphere Monk: there's not a more perfect name to fit his compositions than that name.

  Matthew Shipp

  Music, Names, Perfect

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• The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - that is confrontational. That's just a part of the language of jazz - at a certain point.

  Matthew Shipp

  Music, Elements, Jazz

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• I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

  Wayne Shorter

  Music, Thinking, Jazz

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• I don't like drug addicts and she sounds like a cat.

  Nina Simone

  Music, Cat, Drug

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• I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.

  Nina Simone

  Music, Rights, People

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