Jazz Quotes

I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.

I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.

Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.

Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Well, I had started a program which is even longer running than this one in 1967 which was a jazz program called The Best of Jazz and that still goes out on Monday nights. That's been going for 33 years or something.

Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.

I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock-n-roll with jazz, and I thought I could make some money playing music.

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

I have been steadily exchanging a rock audience who were nervous about what they had just bought for a jazz audience who not only were happy with their purchase, but are increasingly coming again.

I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.

Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

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

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.

Well I went to New Orleans to cover the jazz festival for Trio, it's this new arts channel, it's really great.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.

I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.

Tone on jazz guitars is a real tough issue.

What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don't think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.

Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'

I was exposed to jazz early on.

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

I've been informed by both sides, jazz, western music, Asian music, African music, all sides, because I've been interested in the sound of the universe, and that sound is without limit.