Jazz Quotes - Page 4

• Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

  Dave Brubeck

  Voice, Musician, Chance

  40 Copy quote

• It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing.

  Pat Metheny

  Verbs, Fruit, Becoming

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• The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.

  Stan Getz

  Music, People, Soul

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• To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

  Nina Simone

  Music, Mean, Play

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• Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

  Jelly Roll Morton

  Music, Style, May

  1938 In Downbeat, Aug.

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• I'm all in favor of getting grants for musicians. Or any other good brand of Scotch.

  Pepper Adams

  Music, Scotch, Favors

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• Jazz is the language of the emotions.

  Charles Mingus

  Emotion, Language, Jazz Music

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• Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn't want me to be too famous too young.

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Fate, Want

  Mark Tucker, Duke Ellington (1995). “The Duke Ellington Reader”, p.398, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don't care what you play anyway.

  Charles Mingus

  Play, Musician, Care

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• Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

  Steve Lacy

  People, Collectivity

  85 Copy quote

• I think I was supposed to play jazz.

  Herbie Hancock

  Music, Thinking, Play

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• There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.

  Henri Matisse

  Music, Wonderful, Improvisation

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• Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

  Herbie Hancock

  Music, Genre, Borrowed

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• Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.

  Sonny Rollins

  Music, Jazz And Life, Type

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• At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Fashion, Believe

  90 Copy quote

• Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost.

  Albert Ayler

  Music, Father, Son

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• Music is my religion. Music is the only thing that has never failed me. People let you down, music won't.

  Gary Bartz

  Music, People, Musical

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• The thing is this: When I play, what I try to do is to reach my subconscious level. I don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at the same time - believe me, I've tried it (laughs).

  Sonny Rollins

  Music, Believe, Thinking

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• A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

  Abraham Maslow

  Inspirational, Music, Peace

  Abraham Harold Maslow, Edward Hoffman (1996). “Future visions: the unpublished papers of Abraham Maslow”, Sage Publications, Inc

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• It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

  Stan Getz

  Music, Alphabet, Language

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• My own feelings about the direction in which jazz should go are that there should be much less stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content, on what might be termed humanity in music and the freedom to say all that you want.

  Booker Little

  Music, Stress, Emotional

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• Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

  Miles Davis

  Music, Play, African American

  "SPIN" Magazine, (p. 30), December 1990.

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• Don't be a perfectionist... leave that to the classical musicians.

  Dave Brubeck

  Musician, Perfectionist, Classical Music

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• Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

  Art Blakey

  Country, Art, America

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• Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

  Tony Wilson

  Listening, Musician, Doe

  40 Copy quote