Top Jazz Quotes

The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise.

To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The...

it ain't as hard as picking cotton

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.

I'm saddened to see that everyone's pitched out the baby with the bath, in that we say that it can't be one or the other, it could be both. I mean, just because we listen to classical music doesn't me...

Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thre...

If it sounds good, it is good.

I wore a $30 vintage wedding dress for my 8th birthday in an underground jazz club in Seattle. This was what I wanted.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

The piano ain't got no wrong notes.

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Ch...

I would love to do a biopic of a famous singer, like Diana Ross or Donna Summer, or an old jazz story that we haven't seen before. I would love to do that! I would love to play Diana Ross 'cause she's...

Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting th...

I believe in dressing for the occasion. There's a time for sweater, sneakers and Levis and a time for the full-dress jazz.

Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.

Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'

For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a...

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from t...