Jazz

"Jazz is the false liquidation of art—instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture."

"If you have to ask, you'll never know."

"Destructive or redemptive, degenerate or transformative? Jazz is a phenomenon, a true world music."

"Jazz, often called America's classical music, so influenced our culture that Americans named a decade after it. Like the country of its birth, jazz blends many traditions, such as African-American folk, rhythm and blues, French Creole classical form, and gospel. Through the creation and performance of music like jazz, black Americans were better able to exchange ideas freely across racial and cultural barriers."

"When people hear the word "jazzman," the first thing they think is unemployed, then dope and sex, but the young guys aren't like that anymore. I'd like a girl to be able to take me home and introduce me to her parents and hear them say, "Oh, a jazzman. Isn't that fine.""

"When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They're the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created."

"By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."

"Well, feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

"There is a view that jazz is "evil" because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work. They knew how to punch through music that would cure and make people feel good."

"I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next."

"Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound things—not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race put into sound … jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music."

"Jazz is not a "form" but a collection of tags and tricks."

"Music is a journey. Jazz is getting lost."

"[T]he Negroes invented [Jazz] to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other."

"What makes the performance is the dialogue created between you and everybody around you spontaneously. And you have to interact with everybody up there, interacting and reacting, throwing out ideas. Jazz is a purely democratic music. It's collective creativity where somebody introduces something and we all get a chance to say something about it. It always amazes me, the whole of it is just a great spirit. It grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath."

"Jazz has got to retain its integrity, its spirituality. It's got to mean something. That's No. 1. There are a lot of great players thinking that way in the music. It's all good. I don't think we should lament the fact that, Oh, we can't play in the clubs anymore. That's passing. We'll be able to, as musicians, play serious jazz. I think that will prevail. I can't prophesize, but I have a strong intuitive feeling that it will be stronger than ever and have another shot at trying to turn this world around."

"The basic principles of all jazz styles are the same. Good musical taste, technical skill, and a firm grasp of the principles of chord construction and chord progression make up the sum total."

"You can be a jazz player and be respected by musicians, but the rest of the world doesn’t care. [...] We’re going to play a game: name a jazz player that means something."

"You don't often see a musician that is able to play jazz."

"Even people who don’t know much about jazz are aware that jazz musicians are meant to be ‘characters’ – free-spirited types whose absorption in music generates bizarre behaviour."

"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."