The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
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...
I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jaz...
Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.
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...
Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.
Jazz isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going t...
Trust me, the only real way to understand 'Chic' is in highfalutin terms. Our chord progressions were based on European modal melodies. I made those early 'Chic' records to impress my jazz friends.
My strength is to communicate with an audience and to know what jazz singing is capable of.
I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snar...
Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.
I'd love to give my girls a traditional Thanksgiving with turkey and all that jazz, but we've raised them to love Tuscan food so much that they don't care for it. My favorite is a nice polenta with be...
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
The piano ain't got no wrong notes.
If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United Sta...
Kind of the sad thing is that - it's still true - a lot of jazz people just listen to jazz, and a lot of hip-hop people just listen to hip-hop, and there's not a lot of crossover, unfortunately.
I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.
I've never studied the classics, but I'd like to. My teacher offered to show me how the Greeks were able to sculpt someone perfectly. From there, you can go off and experiment - sort of like jazz. Onc...
Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.