Jazz Quotes

Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

music

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

music

If you're in jazz and more than ten people like you, you're labeled commercial.

The Sound of Surprise.

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is this freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones—ordinary musicians from down South who carried the music to the corners of the country, to little speakeasies in little towns where they played honky-tonk music for $5 a night.  Or less.  Sometimes they played for drinks, and the sheer love of it.

I listen to a jazz band at the Casino de Paris: high in the air, in a kind of cage, the Negroes writhe, dandle, toss lumps of raw meat to the crowd in the form of trumpet screams, rattles, drumbeats.  The dance tune, broken, punched, counterpointed rises now and again to the surface.

Jazz is a language.  It is people living in sound.  Jazz is people talking, laughing, crying, building, painting, mathematicizing, abstracting, extracting, giving to, taking from, making of.  In other words, living.

By and large ... jazz was like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

Playing "bop" is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

Thus it came to pass that jazz multiplied all over the face of the earth and the wiggling of bottoms was tremendous.

Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk music.

Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

I always thought jazz was like the trunk of a tree.  After the tree has grown, many branches have sprung out.  They're all with different leaves and they all look beautiful.

Jazz has always been a man telling the truth about himself.

Jazz joins together what man has put asunder.  To man the theorizer, builder, tradesman, and scientist, jazz restores man the tribesman, maker of symbols and myths and dreams.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues.

Jazz is the best of all nourishments.  It feeds the creative spirit like nothing else can.

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary boy scout.

Jazz is the nobility of the race put into sound; it is the sensuousness of romance in our dialect; it is the picture of the people in all their glory.

Jazz is the music of the body.

Music is a journey. Jazz is getting lost.

Jazz,
The meaning of it,
Is as evasive as silence.
Name one who could
Accurately define this
Passional art that slices
And churns one's senses
Into so many delicate
barbarous
And uncountable patterns.

Jazz may be thought of as a current that bubbled forth from a spring in the slums of New Orleans to become the mainstream of the twentieth century.  In less than fifty years it has flooded the United States and the rest of the world.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz?  "Safe sex of the highest order."

Let's face it.  Jazz has made some dangerous friends.  There's something of the opium eater in your jazz cultist.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.