quotations about jazz
Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.
MILES DAVIS
attributed, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance
Prior to what we call jazz musicians were almost in slavery, except for the conductor and the composer. It was just sitting in an orchestra doing the bidding of two people.
JOE NEWMAN
Cadence, 1979
We're making something, something, what is it? Is it jazz? Why, yes, Lord, it's jazz. Thank you, sir, and thank you, sir, we finally got it, something that is ours, something great that belongs to us and to us alone, that we made, and that's why it's important and that's what it's all about.
CHARLES BEAUMONT
American Fantastic Tales
Jazz is comedy, American-style: comedy darkened by tragic experience.
ROBERT G. O'MEALLY
introduction, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture
Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.
FRANK ZAPPA
"Be-Bop Tango"
Jazz is a child of the 20th century, but it has now left home.
MIKE NOCK
attributed, Is Jazz Dead?: Or Has It Moved to a New Address
By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.
DUKE ELLINGTON
attributed, To a Harmony with Our Souls
As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all.
WYNTON MARSALIS
Z Magazine, 1995
Where's jazz going? I don't know? Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.
THELONIOUS MONK
attributed, Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making
The teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he's going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.
BILL EVANS
Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings
The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow -- from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.
J. A. ROGERS
"Jazz at Home"
When people say they hate jazz it's because they have no context.
DAMIEN CHAZELLE
La La Land
Jazz is the false liquidation of art -- instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
attributed, The Sociology of Rock
Collective improvisation in jazz is like a fast break in basketball; the cornet or trumpet player is like the ball handler. Both are located in the center of the action--mid-range melody for the musician, center court for the basketball player. Other players flank the center and react to what the player controlling the action does. In both cases, the process is spontaneous, but it occurs within prescribed and well-understood boundaries.
MICHAEL CAMPBELL
Popular Music in America: The Beat Goes On
Jazz has endured because it doesn't have a beginning or an ending. It's a moment.
ROBERT ALTMAN
Esquire, Mar. 2004
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
"The Race for Space", The Duke Ellington Reader
Music is a journey. Jazz is getting lost.
JOHN O'FARRELL
The Best a Man Can Get
A Jazz musician is someone that puts a $5,000 horn in a $500 car and drives 50 miles for $5 gig.
ANONYMOUS
The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
"Perennial Fashion--Jazz", Prisms
Jazz is like bananas -- it must be consumed on the spot.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
"Jazz in America"