Jazz Quotations

Jazz music

"By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."
- Duke Ellington

"Jazz is the false liquidation of art—instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture."
- Theodor Adorno, quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith, 1978. ISBN 0094602204.

"Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound things—not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race put into sound ... jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music."
- Wynton Marsalis

"What makes the performance is the dialogue created between you and everybody around you spontaneously. And you have to interact with everybody up there, interacting and reacting, throwing out ideas. Jazz is a purely democratic music. It's collective creativity where somebody introduces something and we all get a chance to say something about it. It always amazes me, the whole of it is just a great spirit. It grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath."
- Max Roach

"Jazz is not a 'form' but a collection of tags and tricks."
- Ernest Newman. The Sunday Times, "The World of Music", 4 September 1927.

"If you have to ask, you'll never know."
- Louis Armstrong when asked to define the rhythmic concept of "swing", quoted in Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz by John F. Szwed, 2000. ISBN 0786884967.

"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."
- Lyric from Frank Zappa's "Be-Bop Tango"

"Music is a journey. Jazz is getting lost."
- John O'Farrell 'The Best a Man Can Get' (1999)

“When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They're the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created.”
- Gerald Early