Jazz Quotes

“Either you have the feeling or you don't. Hawk Davies”
― Daniel Handler, Why We Broke Up

“If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.”
― Vera Nazarian

“There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly. ”
― Boris Vian

“The piano ain't got no wrong notes.”
― Thelonious Monk

“If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.”
― Louis Armstrong

“Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.”
― Lady Gaga

“All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.”
― Nathan Reese Maher

“People know what they want because they know what other people want.”
― Theodor Adorno

“It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”
― Miles Davis

“What is my definition of jazz? 'Safe sex of the highest order.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.”
― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“Life is a lot like jazz - it's best when you improvise.”
― George Gershwin

“To be a jazz freedom fighter is to attempt to galvanize and energize world-weary people into forms of organization with accountable leadership that promote critical exchange and broad reflection. The interplay of individuality and unity is not one of uniformity and unanimity imposed from above but rather of conflict among diverse groupings that reach a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism. As with a soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band, individuality is promoted in order to sustain and increase the creative tension with the group--a tension that yields higher levels of performance to achieve the aim of the collective project. This kind of critical and democratic sensibility flies in the face of any policing of borders and boundaries of "blackness", "maleness", "femaleness", or "whiteness".”
― Cornel West, Race Matters

“My eyes hunger to read more books then time allows me to devour.”
― Jazz Feylynn

“There's something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It's really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it's all for one purpose, and there's no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it's all up to you. It's really jazz__that's the big secret. Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.”
― Keith Richards, Life

“I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.”
― Miles Davis

“When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of "jazz" as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.”
― David Sedaris, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

“Real women don't love the richest guy in the world they love the guy who can make their world the richest.”
― Jazz Feylynn

“Where’s jazz going? I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”
― Thelonious Monk

“Sans le jazz, la vie serait une erreur”
― Boris Vian

“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.

Rock-and-roll, on the other hand, presumes that the four of us--as damaged and anti-social as we are--might possibly get it to-fucking-gether, man, and play this simple song. And play it right, okay? Just this once, in tune and on the beat. But we can't. The song's too simple, and we're too complicated and too excited. We try like hell, but the guitars distort, the intonation bends, and the beat just moves, imperceptibly, against our formal expectations, whetehr we want it to or not. Just because we're breathing, man. Thus, in the process of trying to play this very simple song together, we create this hurricane of noise, this infinitely complicated, fractal filigree of delicate distinctions.

And you can thank the wanking eighties, if you wish, and digital sequencers, too, for proving to everyone that technologically "perfect" rock--like "free" jazz--sucks rockets. Because order sucks. I mean, look at the Stones. Keith Richards is always on top of the beat, and Bill Wyman, until he quit, was always behind it, because Richards is leading the band and Charlie Watts is listening to him and Wyman is listening to Watts. So the beat is sliding on those tiny neural lapses, not so you can tell, of course, but so you can feel it in your stomach. And the intonation is wavering, too, with the pulse in the finger on the amplified string. This is the delicacy of rock-and-roll, the bodily rhetoric of tiny increments, necessary imperfections, and contingent community. And it has its virtues, because jazz only works if we're trying to be free and are, in fact, together. Rock-and-roll works because we're all a bunch of flakes. That's something you can depend on, and a good thing too, because in the twentieth century, that's all there is: jazz and rock-and-roll. The rest is term papers and advertising.”
― Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

“Welcome to Book-a-holic Anonymous.

Hi, I'm Jazz and I am addicted to the written word. I love the smell of the blackest ink sliding across texture paper. My eyes squint against the loss of time within the pages of story. I don't think there's a cure for my compulsion to lose myself within life and times of those characters bound between the covers.”
― Jazz Feylynn

“You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.”
― Louis Armstrong

“A spiritual journey is becoming what one has always meant to be-come and always was. One with God's Spirit.”
― Jazz Feylynn

“Butterfly upon my hand, A voice of wonder within my mind, not my own but the butterfly's.”
― Jazz Feylynn

“Twist a tongue, and tongue a twist how many twists can a tongue twister twist around the twisting tongue.”
― Jazz Feylynn

“Jazz is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.”
― Duke Ellington

“There is in this a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it — how often do we see even the most famous of jazz artists being devoured alive by their imitators, and, shamelessly, in the public spotlight?”
― Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act

“After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines—well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads—that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco—the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.”
― Denis Johnson, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

“A psychic friend could come in very handy." I reshuffled my cards.
"I predict I will," she said.”
― Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon