A Quote by Dave Hickey

Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.

Dave Hickey

Quote Topics

Autonomous Away Be Nice Best Beyond Complicated Concerns Dialectic Dispense Does Dudes Feel Formal Four Free Hold Jazz Like Many Might Music Never Never Quit Nice One Or Two Only Onto Other Our Out Playing Quite Say Simpatico Simply Social Somehow Sometimes Song Stratosphere Time Together Tried Two Us Well Which While Wire Wires Works Would Would Be

Quote Author

Dave Hickey
American - Critic
Born: December 5, 1940

I got into playing the jazz. I played jazz for a good while. I did the popular stuff first. You got the "Twelfth Street Rag" and those kinds of things. Then I got to hanging around with a bunch of guys starting to playing jazz. We'd go from one place to the other and take our instruments, just perform for free.

Papa John Creach

I was going to say is that I come from a rock background, but also I was super interested in jazz for a long time. I was training to be a jazz musician for quite a while. I never trained to be a classical composer or player, but I did train to play jazz.

Jherek Bischoff

I always leaned toward free jazz... experimental jazz and progressive jazz. I feel like jazz is just part of the flavor and palette that you have as a musician to experiment with.

Arturo O'Farrill

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

Brian Eno

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.

Allan Holdsworth

I think of myself as a jazz player, and my music as a natural extension of the jazz tradition. What I'm doing is completely free improvisation ('composing in real time') with nothing predetermined. I've had a lot of experience playing many different kinds of music and several different instruments, and since I tend not to waste anything, it all shows up somewhere in the music I'm playing now.

Richard Grossman

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

Nat Wolff

Put it this way: Jazz is a good barometer of freedom... In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.

Duke Ellington

I don't know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I'm not putting jazz down, but I'm not a jazz singer...I've recorded all kinds of music, but (to them) I'm either a jazz singer or a blues singer. I can't sing a blues – just a right-out blues – but I can put the blues in whatever I sing. I might sing 'Send In the Clowns' and I might stick a little bluesy part in it, or any song. What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.

Sarah Vaughan

I remember when I was a kid and I used to go and see Queen play live. It was like there was Queen the album band, and then Queen the four dudes on stage playing the songs on stage, and it never lacked anything to me when it was just the four dudes playing the big songs.

Pat Smear

I started playing music around 13 or 14, played jazz in high school, and played other stuff in college. After college, I tried to make it as a musician. I lived in a big squalid house full of dudes outside of Boston. We were all musicians. We built this studio in the basement and played there all hours of the day.

Jesse Andrews

When I was about seventeen, I had a group called the Young Jazz Giants. We played all originals. When we would finish playing, people would be like, 'Oh my God, that was so nice, that was so great.' But Pops would never tell us we were the best. He would give it to us straight, like, 'You're out of tune. You're dropping beats.'

Kamasi Washington

If I have to be considered any type of jazz artist, it would be New Orleans jazz because New Orleans jazz never forgot that jazz is dance music and jazz is fun. I'm more influenced by that style of jazz than anything else.

Trombone Shorty

It's cool. One of the dudes who I made my album with who I'm a very good friend of for quite a while, I lived on his sofa for a while. And he's a professional guitar player, and he played for One Direction. And so I'd wake up on a sofa sometimes with Harry from One Direction on the other sofa, and I'd kind of be like 'you alright?'

Ed Sheeran

I studied jazz at home with my grandparents. They always had jazz dudes at the house, but I didn't study formally. I just hung around a lot of musicians.