Jazz Band Quotes

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

  Louis Armstrong

  Music, Jazz, Asks

  "Jazz Giants of the 20th Century/ Taglines". www.imdb.com. 2007.

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• If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it.

  Louis Armstrong

  Life, Music, Practice

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• If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Jazz, Epitome

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• I think the key that differentiates the good actors from the mediocre ones that are still trying to come up, is that the good ones know how to listen. It's like being in a jazz band. They know how to listen to what the other musicians are playing. And where to come in and where to sit out. That's my approach to being in an ensemble cast and working with any kind of actors in a scene.

  Wesley Snipes

  Thinking, Keys, Trying

  Source: collider.com

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• Shared leadership... is less like a an orchestra, where the conductor is always in charge, and more like a jazz band, where leadership is passed around ... depending on what the music demands at the moment and who feels most moved by the spirit to express the music.

  Phillip C. Schlechty

  Educational, Band, Demand

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• 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 Adorno

  Giving Up, Symbolism, Sound

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.352, Univ of California Press

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• It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

  George Santayana

  Football, Art, Kindness

  George Santayana (1968). “Santayana on America: Essays, Notes, and Letters on American Life, Literature, and Philosophy”

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• The history of all big jazz bands shows was, first they played for dancing, and then they played for singing.

  Norman Granz

  Sight, Dancing, Singing

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• I was 16 when I came to New York. I had graduated to a tenor banjo in the school jazz band, and it was kind of boring - just chords, chords, chords. Then my father took me to a mountain music and dance festival in Asheville, North Carolina, and there I saw relatively uneducated people playing great music by ear.

  Pete Seeger

  New York, Father, School

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• [On John Tunnard:] One day a marvelous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat walked into the gallery. He looked a little like Groucho Marx. He was as animated as a jazz-band leader, which he turned out to be. He showed us his gouaches, which were as musical as Kandinsky's, as delicate as Klee's, and as gay as Miró's.

  Peggy Guggenheim

  Gay, Artist, Men

  Peggy Guggenheim (2016). “Out of This Century: The Informal Memoirs of Peggy Guggenheim”, p.164, Ravenio Books

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• The jazz band's chief stimulus, of course, was the rise of the negro 'blues' and their exploitation by the negro song-writer, W. C. Handy.

  Bix Beiderbecke

  Song, Band, Jazz

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• I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.

  Molly Ringwald

  Father, Years, Trying

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• My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

  Bob Dylan

  Song, Pages, Band

  Bob Dylan “The fiddler now upspoke: a collection of Bob Dylan's interviews, press conferences and the like from throughout the masters career”

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• Don't clap I'm not a jazz band for Christ's sake.

  Dylan Moran

  Funny, Humor, Band

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• I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then.

  Miles Teller

  School, Piano, Band

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• When I was young, I never bought records because my brother Joseph played saxophone and had a record player. I loved listening to his records: The Dorsey Brothers, Duke Ellington, all the big American jazz bands, and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Ernestine Anderson, and Kitty White, a singer from the US who was a friend of Nina Simone. Nobody in America seems to know about her, but she was quite popular in South Africa.

  Miriam Makeba

  Brother, Player, White

  "Miriam Makeba: Mama Africa Goes Home". J. Poet, Crawdaddy! Magazine, February 11, 2009.

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• I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school.

  Chad Smith

  School, Class, Band

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• I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.

  Ronnie Milsap

  Country, Children, Teenager

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• I used to hang out a lot in jazz clubs, and the groups took to a kid like me who wasn't afraid to get up and sing with a jazz band. Then I started to hang out in rock clubs and learned to carry off different styles.

  Eric Burdon

  Kids, Rocks, Style

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• And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.

  Travis Barker

  School, Years, Three

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• I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

  Wyclef Jean

  School, Musical, Band

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• I haven't a great Jazz band and I don't want one.

  Glenn Miller

  Music, Band, Want

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• I haven't got a great jazz band and I don't want one. Some of the critics, Down Beat's among them, point their fingers at us and charge us with forsaking real jazz . . . It's all in what you define as 'real jazz.' It happens that to our ears harmony comes first. A dozen colored bands have a better beat than mine. Our band stresses harmony.

  Glenn Miller

  Real, Stress, Band

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• It's true I've always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

  Gerry Mulligan

  Band, Way, Jazz

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• Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones

  Gerry Mulligan

  Two, Twenties, Three

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