Jazz Quotes - Page 5

• Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.

  Duke Ellington

  Barometer

  Mark Tucker, Duke Ellington (1995). “The Duke Ellington Reader”, p.295, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

  B. B. King

  Brother, School, College

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• Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world.

  Ahmad Alaadeen

  Music, Race, America

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• I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Anything Goes, Hell

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• I believe that regardless of how many people you've listened to or emulated over the years, your sound is you and what you really feel inside.

  Clark Terry

  Music, Believe, Years

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• We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

  Ken Burns

  Hard Times, Understanding, Having A Hard Time

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• In classical music, love is based on bitin' -- imitation. It's not based on interpretation. A jazz musician, if he plays someone else's song, has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

  Todd Boyd

  Song, Responsibility, Love Is

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• Jazz is not a 'form' but a collection of tags and tricks.

  Ernest Newman

  Tag, Form, Tricks

  "The World of Music". The Sunday Times, September 4, 1927.

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• Paul Desmond sounds like a female alcoholic.

  Eddie Condon

  Sound, Female, Alcoholics

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• You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

  Stan Getz

  Music, Cameras, Camera Angles

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• I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.

  Dizzy Gillespie

  Music, Careers, Sound

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• What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.

  Maxim Gorky

  Mean, Abuse, Black

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• The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.

  Amiri Baraka

  Moving, Reality, Blue

  Imamu Amiri Baraka (1984). “Daggers and javelins: essays, 1974-1979”, William Morrow & Co

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• The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

  Louis Armstrong

  Music, Memories, Night

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• You've got to learn your instrument.

  Charlie Parker

  Instruments

  "Acting Is a Job: Real-life Lessons About the Acting Business". Book by Jason Pugatch, p. 73, 2006.

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• ...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

  Pat Metheny

  Musical, Jazz And Life, Verbs

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• It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.

  Albert Einstein

  Music, Discovery, Perception

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• When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.

  Eric Dolphy

  Music, Air, African American

  Holiday magazine, Vol. 58,p. 13, 1977.

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• Tastes are created by the business interests. How else can you explain the popularity of Al Hirt?

  Charles Mingus

  Als, Taste, Popularity

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• It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

  Johann Sebastian Bach

  Music, Keys, Play

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• Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

  Samuel Butler

  Inspirational, Motivational, Music

  Samuel Butler (2016). “The Way of All Flesh”, p.57, Samuel Butler

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• Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

  George Foreman

  Music, Sports, People

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• I have to admit that more and more lately, the whole idea of jazz as an idiom is one that I've completely rejected. I just don't see it as an idiomatic thing any more...To me, if jazz is anything, it's a process, and maybe a verb, but it's not a thing. It's a form that demands that you bring to it things athat are valuable to you, that are personal to you. That, for me, is a pretty serious distinction that doesn't have anything to do with blues, or swing, or any of these other things that tend to be listed as essentials in order for music to be jazz with a capital J.

  Pat Metheny

  Swings, Order, Ideas

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• It's the honesty you apply to your playing that makes music enjoyable. The style of the music has little to do with it. It's only honesty makes it beautiful.

  Elvin Jones

  Music, Beautiful, Honesty

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• There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.

  Boris Vian

  Love, Music, Beautiful

  Boris Vian (2001). “I spit on your graves”, Canongate Books

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