Top 1200 Jazz And Blues Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

Certain music, jazz in particular, has the ability to make you a better citizen of the world. It helps you expand your world view and gives you more confidence in your cultural achievements. Improvisational jazz teaches you about yourself while the swing in jazz teaches you how to work with others

The blues is always there. It's going to be hard out here, but it's all right. It's all right, and that's what the blues teaches you. You got to roll with the punches and find your equilibrium.

New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born.

Blues is not a dream, blues is truth.

Our repertoire consisted of rhythm and blues, sort of country rhythm and blues, Sonny Terry things.

The average age of the Jazz audience is increasing rapidly. Rapidly enough to suggest that there is no replacement among young people. Young people aren't starting to listen to Jazz and carrying it along in their lives with them. Jazz is becoming more like Classical music in terms of its relationship to the audience. And just a Classical music is grappling with the problem of audience development, so is Jazz grappling with this problem. I believe, deeply that Jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say to ordinary people. But it has to be systematic about getting out the message.

Symmetria by the Uccello Project is a gorgeous, instrumental and largely unclassifiable record. Best thought of as 'cinematic', each of the tracks conjures up a range of emotions and images, taking the listener on a beautiful journey. The layers of basses, guitars and percussion ebb and flow, drawing on jazz, folk, blues and African music, blending all the elements into one lovely album. Recommended.

The delta blues is a low-down, dirty shame blues. It's a sad, big wide sound, something to make you think about people who are dead or the women who left you.

I've listened to Jazz since I was born and always knew I'd be a Jazz singer!

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

To me, Sabbath was always JUSt a really heavy blues band. That s all we were. We just took those blues roots and made them heavier.

While the House of Blues slogan has been 'In blues we trust,' its stages are usually filled with more reliable moneymakers - Neil Diamond and A Tribe Called Quest among them.

My mother was into opera and my father was into jazz, so there was a lot of jazz in the house where I grew up.

Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.

My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.

Depending on what you allow, you can still get the blues, man. I'm still trying to figure out where the blues really lies, where the street is.

Jazz is a fighter. The word 'jazz' means to me, 'I dare you. Let's jump into the unknown!'

I'm a jazz musician by education and vocation, but I don't think jazz should [ dictate] what I want to do.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie's big band - all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.

From the spiritual came the blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. I heard all of that music growing up, and that has influenced how I approached classical music. I'm sure of it.

Here, in the US, people like our music because it's very similar to blues. It's the same thing in Europe. Everyone listens to blues and rock, it's universal. Everyone dances.

I'm not a jazz artist. Don't get me wrong now, it's all music to me. I just played music and if it's likeable, someone liked the sound, then fine, but I'm not interested in being a jazz musician. I don't consider myself a jazz musician. I don't have anything to do with that word.

The common root, of course, comes out of Africa. That's the pulse.The African pulse. It's all the way back from . . . the old slave chants and up through the blues, the jazz, and up through rock. And it's all got the African pulse.

The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues.

Recording in Nashville was absolutely essential to get the sound, the musicians, the atmosphere, the warmth... There are just cult places like that in the world, like Chicago for the blues or New York for jazz. Nothing sounds the same in Nashville as it does elsewhere. Nashville is the Mecca of country music and everyone knows it.

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way. I mean if we want approval, we have to sing the blues, even as singers we sing the blues.

I wouldn't think a blues album would be that commercially successful, but I don't really care. I'd do it for the love of blues, not for the money. I've got plenty of money.

Jazz was always cool. That was what I liked about jazz - it was always cool. Now I see the cats that were basically cool getting kind of uncool. So that ruins what I feel about jazz.

The French - they like jazz, they've been on jazz a long time.

I don't play anything but the blues, but now I could never make no money on nothin' but the blues. That's why I wasn't interested in nothin' else.

I sing God's music because it makes me feel free. It gives me hope. With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues.

I find as much inspiration from the forerunners of jazz as I do the modern-day innovators of jazz.

One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.

I tend to play a lot of blues things at home, because most blues things are basically within a 12-bar pattern.

As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars.

I always wanted to do a story on the blues that not only reflected its nature and its content, but also alludes to the form itself…In short, a story that gives you the impression of the blues.

People have been brainwashed into believing that it's got to be down or it wouldn't be blues. But it's not so. It's got to be a fact or it wouldn't be blues.

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

Jazz is a music that really allows a person to express his deepest self, his most personal self - Africa being the primary source of jazz. Naturally, improvisation and swing are a part of jazz, improvisation being the key.

But sometimes that title 'jazz' can vex people who think they know exactly what jazz always is and will be.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.

I've had experiences where people say, 'I hated jazz before I heard you guys!' I'm like, 'You didn't hate jazz before you heard us, you hated the idea of jazz.'

I've had experiences where people say, 'I hated jazz before I heard you guys!' I'm like, 'You didn't hate jazz before you heard us; you hated the idea of jazz.'

Singing about your sadness unburdens your soul. But the blues hollers shouted about more than being sad. They were also delivering messages in musical code. If the master was coming, you might sing a hidden warning to the other field hands . . . The blues could warn you what was coming. I could see the blues was about survival.

You don't have to live the blues to play the blues.

I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

My greatest influence has been the blues. And that's a literary influence, because I think the blues is the best literature that we as black Americans have.

Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

Blues for me is having things not go your way - life, love, job, money, ... It is not about the oppression of my ancestors, who were trying to get back at the overseers. Blues is different for my generation.

When I started saxophone, my dad took me to my uncle's church, and I started playing there, too. At its best, music serves a greater purpose, and that showed me a whole other side to spiritual jazz, one which you can hear in the music - the gospel and blues feel, the soul that's embedded into the more avant-garde records.

The blues is something separate from what I do. They connect at certain spots, but blues is different. I wouldn't put it in with what my career has been. That would be a whole separate wing.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

The difference between blues, jazz, rock n' roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It's scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

Of course when you are a kid you listen to what your parents had around. A lot of gospel, jazz. Now when I started to listen to music on my own it was around the time of the birth of rock and roll. Shortly thereafter I started to get into more blues and more traditional rootsy American music.

The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?

The French - they like jazz, theyve been on jazz a long time.