quotations about jazz
How are you gonna be a revolutionary if you're such a traditionalist? You hold onto the past, but jazz is about the future.
DAMIEN CHAZELLE
La La Land
Jazz, like left-wing politics and "the common man", was a cause.
MARTIN T. WILLIAMS
King Oliver
Jazz is like postmodernist literature, freedom without form.
MORRIS B. HOLBROOK
Playing the Changes on the Jazz Metaphor
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.
JACK KEROUAC
"Mexico City Blues"
Jazz is not a "form" but a collection of tags and tricks.
ERNEST NEWMAN
"The World of Music", The Sunday Times, September 4, 1927
Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.
PAUL WHITEMAN
attributed, Ballyhoo: The Voice of the Press
Jazz is a marvel of paradox: too fundamentally human, at least as modern humanity goes, to be typically racial, too international to be characteristically national, too much abroad in the world to have a special home. And yet jazz in spite of it all is one part American and three parts American Negro, and was originally the nobody's child of the levee and the city slum.
J. A. ROGERS
"Jazz at Home"
I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.
KURT VONNEGUT
Timequake
It is just the epidemic contagiousness of jazz that makes it, like the measles, sweep the block. But somebody had to have it first: that was the Negro.
J. A. ROGERS
"Jazz at Home"
Jazz players do it standing up.
ANONYMOUS
It's the group sound that's important, even when you're playing a solo. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.
OSCAR PETERSON
attributed, Oscar Peterson: A Musical Biography
Musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that's what jazz music is all about.
STAN GETZ
attributed, Music and the Sociological Gaze
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
DUKE ELLINGTON
attributed, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington
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.
ART BLAKEY
attributed, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews
Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.
KEITH RICHARDS
Life
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.
BILL EVANS
Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings
Hot can be cool & cool can be hot & each can be both. But hot or cool man, Jazz is Jazz.
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
attributed, Experiencing Jazz: A Listener's Companion
Jazz has come to stay because it is an expression of the times, of the breathless, energetic, superactive times in which we are living.
J. A. ROGERS
"Jazz at Home"
I never heard of a jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so if you retire, what are you going to do, play for the walls?
NAT ADDERLEY
attributed, Jazz: Photographs
Jazz is a musical revelation, a religion, a philosophy of the world.
GEORGE BARTHELME
Kölnische Zeitung, 1919