Jazz music is the real deal.
There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.
People who like Jazz feel the depth and soul and intelligence that the music expresses.
The expression of freedom that is Jazz improvisation mirrors the ethos of the best parts of society.
Jazz standards are our contribution to music history.
Jazz is not to be sliced into bites by mass marketing geniuses who assume we are mindless cattle.
Apparently Jazz is now considered high art and the average person has trouble understanding it.
Without jazz, life would be a mistake.
I heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.
Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.
If you have something in your life worth celebrating, you can put it in a blues song.
Notes are expensive… spend them wisely!
Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.
Don’t say Aretha is making a comeback, because I’ve never been away!
I don’t care for the music when they’re talking bad about women because I think women are God’s greatest gift to the planet – I just like music.
Jazz to me is a living music. It’s a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.
Art [Blakey] would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.
I could see the blues was about survival.
When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.
I’ve always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.
Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference.
Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.
