Jose James Quotes

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

If you're a lay person listening to jazz, you don't necessarily understand everything that's happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you're getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.

What [Louis Armstrong] does is real, and true, and honest, and simple, and even noble. Every time this man puts his trumpet to his lips, even if only to practice three notes, he does it with his whole soul.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another theme, incorporating it, somehow trying to work their way all together to a meaning of some kind, or at least a conclusion.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

There's a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they've been wearing.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

I don't play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word 'jazz' only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that's fine.

Jazz changes and all. But I don't know the names of what it is I'm doing.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play.

I wanted my voice to be a tenor sax, really.

I freestyle, but I'd rather sit down and write down my music to map out what I'm doing. But if I'm out with my friends, I will freestyle, you know?

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

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

Improvisation, if you play it at the top of your intelligence, leads to a kind of truth that people find really accessible.

Fats - very funny man, but every note that he played was like a pearl.

When I'm in the studio, I just let it rip. That's my process. I get in the booth, and whatever is on my mind at the time, I just go off and say it.