Top 1200 Jazz And Life Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it, it's like 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.

My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

I think the people who are saying jazz has to sound a particular way, or, 'What you're doing isn't jazz,' are just scared because they can't do it. A lot of them just aren't talented enough to do anything new, honestly.

Jazz speaks for life. This is triumphant music.

My genre of music is very eclectic. I might play some Latin jazz, or just go into a spontaneous jazz thing. That's the thing about coming to one of my performances. Not every show is the same.

I was very lucky, because when I was at school, I had a great music teacher who would just take out these free-jazz records and play them for me. So it was in my early teens that I started to listen to jazz.

The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Jazz is capable of doing much more than depicting the dope fiend and the drunk and the slinky gal. In our show there are many very funny sequences where we were able to use jazz as it can be used-in a happy way.

I mostly listen to very popular songs. But I'm a huge fan of Stevie Wonder, and I love jazz - Glenn Fredly, Diah Lestari - so 80% jazz, 20% mixed with everything - disco, hip hop.

In New York, I was excited about the music in New York because the only music that I was more or less involved with in the South was either country and western or hillbilly music as we used to call it when I was a kid and, ah, gospel. There was no, there was no in between. And when I got to New York all the other musics that's in the world just came into my head whether it was the classics, jazz, I never knew what jazz was about all, had heard anything about jazz.

There are a few things that I will hopefully be credited for as a pioneer. One is my four-mallet playing. Another one is the starting what was first called jazz rock in 1967 when I started my first band, later became jazz fusion by the 1970s.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its... It deals with it!

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.

Until I was about 16 years old, my dream was to be a musician. I played in rock bands and jazz bands. Then I decided to be an actor and kept the stable career of 'jazz pianist' as my safety net.

My brothers came home with country, jazz, everything... it was always very normal to me to make any type of music. It was possible to fuse all the sounds, so it never sounded confusing to me to mix jazz and dubstep.

What has been America's most nurturing contribution to the culture of this planet so far? Many would say jazz. I, who love jazz, will say this instead: Alcoholics Anonymous.

I've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like jazz needs a big-ass slap.

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.

Jazz has always been my first love. It has this timeless effect on me. It's pretty odd that I didn't become a jazz musician. I went another way because I needed to earn a good living to support my large family.

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.

My dad, was, by trade, he had a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. He's a huge, huge jazz fan. He used to travel all the time for projects, and he used to collect jazz records. He used to collect hundreds and hundreds of jazz records because he had this passion for it. That's kind of how they had certain hobbies together with my mom.

There was a time, from 1935-1946, when teenagers and young adults danced to jazz-orientated bands. When jazz orchestras dominated pop charts and when influential clarinettists were household names. This was the swing era.

I wake up late, say 10 or 11, because we've usually been out and about town until 2 or 3 A.M. listening to music at the jazz clubs or hitting the jazz clubs post-theater.

Jazz isn't as profitable for labels like Hip hop or Rap. Jazz needs subsidies to continue, just like European classical works of Bach and Beethoven are subsidized.

Jazz was the beginning of rhythm music, which developed into rock and roll. But what the jazz musicians lost because they were so far from their homeland was the intricate rhythms of African music.

I'd actually been making my living as an organist with bands since I was probably 15 or 16 years old, and then as a senior in high school I put together a jazz quintet called The Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet.

From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.

I don't play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word 'jazz' only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that's fine.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.

Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.

My dad had two, sometimes three jobs. Besides running the Commodore Music Shop in Manhattan, he did jazz concerts, and he ran this great jazz label, Commodore.

People need to realize that even the greatest jazz musicians, when they listen to jazz, they're not like, analyzing it and deconstructing it - they're enjoying it. It's like listening to any other style of music. It's saying something to you, and you kind of just absorb it.

I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.

Jazz washes away the dust of every day life.

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

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.

It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.

Robert Altman made that movie Kansas City about the jazz scene in the city, and we saw that band all together, and that was an amazing show. That's what I got into. I like jazz.

Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

You basically have to play everything (in New Orleans), because you're getting calls to play gigs of all different styles, from classical to R&B to funk; modern jazz to traditional jazz.

The job of the jazz people is to take it as far as it will go and that's what they're doing. But in the process of taking it out there, there has to be some times when they're not getting it right. It all depends on what you dig. I personally don't think the fusion of jazz with the heaviness of rock is working.

People hear traditional jazz and think it's stale, where there are so many ways it can be opened up. With New Orleans and old-time grooves, there's no limit in what can be done with that. I want to break the stereotype of what traditional jazz is.

Even though the music I make gathers influences from all over the place, I feel that the core of what I do comes from the jazz tradition. In terms of improvisation, interaction, feel and overall concept, Jazz is my main source of information and inspiration.

My band, Miles Long, is a jazz-funk spoken word band. There's jazz sensibilities, but I'm a bass player, so I'm very much into the head-bobbing vibe with sophisticated lyrics.

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.

I've been a massive obsessive about jazz singers all my life.

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.

Life is a lot like jazz. It's best when you improvise.

Rock music was the death of jazz in a way. I know there's a bunch of people who say jazz isn't dead, but I mean, rock 'n roll, you play three chords to 20,000 people; jazz, you play 20,000 chords to three people.

Jazz isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going to survive unless it's got some jazz influence.

The only reason is that I hadn't seen The Modern Jazz Quartet perform live and a live performance is often where the real experience of jazz takes place. I'm not familiar with the Boswell Sisters.

I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.