Jazz Quotes - Page 13

I'm very glad to have met you. I like your playing very much.

I have a secret love of jazz.

I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It's not like I'm cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.

You have to look good.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

If people don't like it [my music] now, they will.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

Well, jazz is to me, a complete lifestyle. It's bigger than a word. It's a much bigger force than just something that you can say. It's something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was.

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.

...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

I wasn't a trained Mickey Mouse club performer. I played in jazz clubs and restaurants.

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.

I'm a spade, you're an ofay. Let's play.

It's either hip or it ain't.

In jazz improv, there is no such thing as wrong notes, only notes that are better chosen and it's not about the note you play, it's about the note you play next.

Jazz is not background music.

Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles.

Shut up and let me see your jazz hands.

I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning.

Ted Lewis could make the clarinet talk. What it said was put me back in the case!

It's like an act of murder - you play with intent to commit something.

I'm not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I'd rather be figured out.