Harvey Pekar Quotes

The great jazz radio stations have a duty to continue evolving their format just as audiences ask the musicians to evolve. How do you do that with a form of music that has 100 years of recorded history? How do you also keep it contemporary so you don't isolate your listeners? These are major questions.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

I don't know how much more what I've done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There've been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.

I always say that the problem with jazz accessibility is not the content of the music, it's people's ability to access it.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

I was really trying to sell to people who hate jazz: to make a case for the art form as youthful and energetic, not the sort of rarified intellectual activity it's painted as.

The people in Japan know more about the history of jazz and the musicians than the people in the United States do.

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.

My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.

We don't live in a jazz world, unfortunately. I think if I had lived in a jazz world, I would have done OK. I'm not sure I would have done great. I'm a lover of jazz music, so I would have been happy, don't get me wrong. I go to jazz concerts like the biggest jazz fan in world. The drag is that I don't play jazz for a living.

Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians.

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

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.

The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.

Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.

I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

I never studied jazz technically; I just know and love the music.

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

Artie Shaw was way ahead of most clarinetists and most jazz players.

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.