jazz quotes

  • The jazz band can be used for artificial excitement and aphrodisiac purposes, but not for spreading eternal truths.

    - SirArthur Bliss
      'Music Policy'.

  •    Though the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less of an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

    - F(rancis) Scott Key Fitzgerald
      'Echoes of the  Jazz  Age', Scribner's Magazine, Nov.

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

    - George Gershwin
    Quoted in D Morgenstern Composers on Music (1958).

  • Now, our music is universal. It shares the rhythmic content of African music, music of the Western Hemisphere and various lands of the East, and has merged this rhythm with European harmonies, the soul of the slaves, the blues, and the spirituals to create jazz.

    - Dizzy (John Birks) Gillespie
      Dizzy ^ To Be Or Not To Bop (with  Al Fraser),'Evolutions'.

  • Jazz music hashaunted America for seventy years.It has tempted us out of our lily-white reserve with its black promise of untrammeled joy.

    -John Clellon Holmes
      Preface to reprint of  The Horn.

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

    -John Paul Jones
    Quoted in  Alan Kendall The Tender Tyrant: Nadia Boulanger (1976).

  • Nobody has ever been able to define jazz satisfactorily. This is probably because anyone who was capable of doing so never really wantedto, knowing how muchyou would have to leave out of the definition.

    - Mary Henrietta Kingsley
      The Jazz  Anthology, ch.1

  • A jazz performance centers upon the process of creation. The final objective is not only the finished product, but the path and process taken towards it.

    - David Liebman
      Self-Portrait of a Jazz- Artist, ch.3.

  • It is this tendency to play with manic enthusiasm on every possible occasion that distinguishes the amateur jazz musician from the professional, often to the public detriment of the latter, who are regarded as snootyand unfriendly.

    - Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton
      Why No Beethoven?, ch.1.

  • Jazz is an impure art. There's a great deal of romantic nostalgia involved.

    - George Melly
      Owning Up, ch.2.

  • It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of jazz, and I, myself, happened to bethe creator intheyear1902† Jazz music isa style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in jazz, if one has the knowledge.

    -Jelly Roll (Ferdinand) Morton
      In Downbeat,  Aug.

  •    The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former music is always greater than its performancewhereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.

    - Andre   (George) Previn
      Quoted in TheTimes.

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

    -John Philip Sousa
    c.1920  Attributed.

  • Jazz is a small word for a vast sound.

    - Clare Teal
      In The Guardian, 29 Dec.

  • Jazz musicians are not demigods. Theyare warm, vulnerablehumanbeings with a desperateneedtogo on paying the rent.

    - Bruce Turner
      Hot Air, Cool Music, ch.10.

  • Jazzcameto Americathreehundred years ago in chains.

    - Paul Whiteman
      Jazz.

  •    Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere if theyare serious about this music† There is no valid motivation for it other than loveoutlaw motivation in a profit-motivated society.

    - Mike Zwerin
      LaTristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis, ch.4.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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