Jazz Music Quotes - Page 14

• I don't dig that two-beat jive the New Orleans cats play. My boys and I have to have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating.

  Count Basie

  Music, Cheating, Cat

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• The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - that is confrontational. That's just a part of the language of jazz - at a certain point.

  Matthew Shipp

  Music, Elements, Jazz

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• Thelonious Sphere Monk: there's not a more perfect name to fit his compositions than that name.

  Matthew Shipp

  Music, Names, Perfect

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• What makes bebop legitimate is the fact that when it was done, it was illegitimate.

  Matthew Shipp

  Music, Bebop, Done

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• I think I'll give them another chance. Americans deserve another chance with my music.

  Albert Ayler

  Music, Thinking, Giving

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• And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it.

  DJ Jazzy Jeff

  Jazz Improvisation, How You Feel, Music Is

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• I don't like drug addicts and she sounds like a cat.

  Nina Simone

  Music, Cat, Drug

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• I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.

  Nina Simone

  Music, Rights, People

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• Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk

  John Lewis

  Music, Innovation, Dizzy

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• I think that's what really a substantial work is, it's forever. It's the truth now and it was the truth then, and it will be the truth tomorrow.

  Abbey Lincoln

  Music, Thinking, Forever

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• I was in New York, miserable because I was working supper clubs but I wasn't expressing myself. I was really unhappy with my life. I saw Max Roach again and he told me I didn't have to do things like that. He made me an honest woman on the stage. I have been performing in that tradition since. I feel that I'm a serious performer now whereas then I wanted to be but I didn't know how.

  Abbey Lincoln

  Music, New York, Unhappy

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• Ornette Coleman wasn't sure whether he was going to continue with Charlie Haden-Charlie had some personal problems. I said "You've got to be kidding! There's no one on the globe who will be able to accompany you" and no one ever did. [Scott LaFaro] was playing atonally and certainly Ornette was not an atonal player. Jimmy Garrison was a tonal player. He wasn't even polytonal or atonal.

  Paul Bley

  Music, Player, Accompany You

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• I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats.

  Paul Bley

  Music, New York, Jazz

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• Now as jazz musicians we're saying for this society, you can free up your imagination. You can proceed in an area without much information and you can function in an area without much information.

  Paul Bley

  Music, Imagination, Information

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• I'd have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I'd just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.

  Bobby Seale

  America, Musician, Add

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• I actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that.

  Douglas Booth

  Grandparent, Musician, Firsts

  Source: www.justjared.com

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• 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.

  Branford Marsalis

  Halloween, Successful, Community

  "Branford Marsalis: It's All About The Band". Interview with Russ Musto, www.allaboutjazz.com. January 12, 2005.

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• A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.

  Steve Lacy

  Athlete, Artist, Dancer

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• What separates great jazz musicians from average ones is Taste. Those who have taste consistently choose notes, tempos, timbres and voicings that seduce and satisfy attentive listeners.

  Marc Myers

  Average, Taste, Musician

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• Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili.

  Harry James

  Food, Cooking, Soul

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• But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Play, Making Love, Musician

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• I started to play Jazz music in my early teens. A boyfriend brought records over, so I listened to everything

  Marian McPartland

  Play, Teens, Records

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• The most important thing to do as an artist is to get out of your comfort zone and work with different people: people who can't read a note of music, people who have incredible classical skills, blues and jazz musicians, pop artists, visual artists, dancers and actors. Learn from people who are creative in a different way to you and you'll keep evolving.

  Katie Noonan

  Art, Skills, People

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• Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Book, Cities, Kansas City

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• The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.

  Ken Burns

  Art, Land, Community

  "Ken Burns and Yusef Salaam Talk THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE; Plus Burns Talks Upcoming Projects like THE ROOSEVELTS, JACKIE ROBINSON and VIETNAM". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. November 17, 2012.

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