A Quote by Billy Taylor
The thing that is making jazz healthy today is that people are coming out of other backgrounds - from rock, folk, from ethnic music. It's changing the music, and for the better.
Related Quotes
Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night.
When I was a young student, I only listened to foreign music, mainly rock music and hard rock. Then I surprised myself by discovering ethnic music. Now I like to listen to music from different places, and in many situations. Even when you work, some ethnic music calms the nerves.
For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.
Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk music.
I love all types of music - jazz, great pop music, world music and folk music - but the music I listen to most is piano music from the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Russian music in particular.
When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.
After 12 intense years of rock music, I was happy to get away from making a record and going out on a tour. When I did it, I wanted to feel inspired. After a while I finally had my fill working on other people's music, and I started coming up with music on my own and said, 'This could be for me.'
After 12 intense years of rock music, I was happy to get away from making a record and going out on a tour. When I did it, I wanted to feel inspired. After a while I finally had my fill working on other people's music, and I started coming up with music on my own and said, 'This could be for me.
I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.
In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music.
Today Jazz music is performed & listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages & creeds.
To most people, jazz-fusion means this dreadful synthetic jazz-rock thing, this jazz-Muzak, which I detest. They also think of jazz as a specific form of music, while to me it's just the opposite.
I think there's a difference between the type of folk music that people put into the box of "folk music" and then there's the kind of folk music that I aspire to and am in awe of, and that is the kind of folk music where it's very limited tools - in most cases a guitar, in a self-taught style that is idiosyncratic and particular to that musician.
This was early '90s and in New York hip-hop was coming on really strong; that was the sort of urban folk music that was almost threatening to eclipse rock music and indie rock music in terms of popularity, which it has certainly gone on to do. But you know, this is the end of the 1980s, beginning of the '90s. The whole independent label thing has really evolved to this incredible point from the early '80s when we started, and there wasn't one record label at all, until a couple people started forming these small labels.
The show is coming from the music. I get on the stage with the band, and I communicate with my musicians, and the music that we create and all that is coming out of us. The music is making the show and the music is creating the atmosphere, so if you close your eyes and listen and feel what it is that's coming out of the speakers, that's the whole point.
When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music.
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