Tal Farlow Quotes

"For something to gain so much popularity and appeal for so many people, it has to be either musically valid or so commercial that you can't ignore it, especially if your living depends on it. Jazz has never really reached that kind of popularity and I don't think it ever will, because you're actually playing for musicians and musicians are not a good crowd to play for. If you are going to try and make some money, you've got to appeal to a wider area than that. But I think that it's the musicians that determine who's good, who goes to the top, and who gets work. I guess the enthusiasts who are not involved in it, just take the musicians word for it." - Tal Farlow

John A. Kouwenhoven Quotes

"The structure of a jazz performance is, like that of the New York skyline, a tension of cross-purposes. In jazz at its characteristic best, each player seems to be—and has the sense of being—on his own. Each goes his own way, inventing rhythmic and melodic patterns which, superficially, seem to have as little relevance to one another as the United Nations building does to the Empire State. And yet the outcome is a dazzlingly precise creative unity." — John A. Kouwenhoven

Gerald Early Quotes

"There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture's ever created." — Gerald Early

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

"And what gift of America to the rest of the world is actually most appreciated by the rest of the world? It is African American jazz and its offshoots. What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order." — Kurt Vonnegut

source: Armageddon in Retrospect

Dave Hickey Quotes

"Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us--simpatico dudes that we are--while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time--while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works--but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns." - Dave Hickey

source: Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

"Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz." — Kurt Vonnegut

source: Palm Sunday

Art Blakey Quotes

"Who knows ... we'll be playing Jazz and having a good time!" - Art Blakey (when asked what Jazz will be like in 50 years.)

source: Interview with WUSS Radio (August 18, 1977)

Art Blakey Quotes

"It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz." - Art Blakey

source: Interview with WUSS Radio (August 18, 1977)

Bill Evans Quotes

"I started to play piano at six. I used to play classical music and only what was written. If they'd asked to play the "Star Spangled Banner," I couldn't have done it without the part. At 12, I was starting to play in bands. I was playing what was written until the day I did something that wasn't. It was wonderful to find something that wasn't written and yet sounded good! That's what really led me to jazz." - Bill Evans

source: Interview with Jazz Magazine (France), 1965

Miles Davis Quotes

"Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it." - Miles Davis

source: Interview with Les Tomkins, 1969

Johnny St. Cyr Quotes

"A jazz musician have to be a working class of man, out in the open all the time, healthy and strong." - Johnny St. Cyr

source: 'Hear Me Talkin' to Ya: The Story of Jazz As Told by the Men Who Made It' (Nat Shapiro, First published 1966)

Frankie Valli Quotes

"Jazz was my first love." - Frankie Valli

Van Morrison Quotes

"The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on." - Van Morrison

Maxim Gorky Quotes

"What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians." - Maxim Gorky

John Corigliano Quotes

"Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it." - John Corigliano

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Quotes

"I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz." - Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Tony Wilson Quotes

"Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does." - Tony Wilson

Jack Kerouac Quotes

"Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety - leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world." - Jack Kerouac

source: Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Part 3, Ch. 10

Art Blakey Quotes

"Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz... it couldn't come from anyone but us. It couldn't come from Africans." - Art Blakey

Randy Sandke Quotes

"Through the dark days of legalized segregation and on into the civil rights era, jazz shone as a beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding. It seemed as if the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color." - Randy Sandke