Ken Burns Quotes

There's not much music I'll listen to if it doesn't have pretty heavy swing. Rhythm is so important. Punk rock would have more power and feeling if it had swing.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.

The core of all the music I love is a good bass line and a good rhythm.

Rhythm is the pulse of music.

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

Rhythm is sound in motion. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It rises and falls. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves.

In fact, jazz has such a great feeling and great emotional content that it really doesn't require you to have technical understanding of it. I think you just have to allow your feelings to go with the music and you will find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

Perhaps of all the most basic elements of music, rhythm most directly affects our central nervous system.

The music has to drive you. That's just it. You follow it. You follow the songs.

I mean, in the course of an evening, people will take a solo here and there, but generally it's all about the rhythm of that music. Dealing with the rhythm with everything. That's essentially at least my concept of what that group is.

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

Music drives you. It wakes you up, it gets you pumping. And, at the end of the day, the correct tune will chill you down.

Music deals with time and timing. It's so magical, but when you get into it, every little sound and every little space between the sounds, it's critical, so critical. And if it's not there, it not only feels wrong, but it ruins things.

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.

The best way to express rhythm is music.

The heart of a music is its rhythm. The heart of rhythm section music is the rhythm.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

I love music more just in and of itself. I love harmony and rhythm.

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.