Laura Mvula Quotes

Playing the sax and then enjoying jazz music, man - it's like I learned how to find words inside of the beat.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be some jazz.

I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.

Gene Krupa was my big hero, and I used to play on my mother's flour cans and sugar cans with the kitchen knives, listening to the big bands on my dad's records. Gene Krupa and Harry James.

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

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.

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.

When I was in college, I had a jazz radio show. I called it 'Excursion on a Wobbly Rail,' after a Cecil Taylor song. I used to run around the Village following Ornette Coleman wherever he played.

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it's the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what's available, what somebody happens to play for you.

My dad actually taught me how to play piano. I was classically trained, but I've started to branch off a little bit into blues and jazz. That's my new thing.

Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at jazz. And I've done that on many occasions.

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

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

If I'm going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.

I played saxophone, so I was into jazz. I learned from each audience and each teacher that I had. I can't really tell you any rules or anything, but the way I develop my beliefs is really just by personally learning from different situations.

My own Brubeck Institute in California is turning out fantastic young jazz players, and I know great things will happen.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.

Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with.

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

I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.

Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.

What about that Dave Brubeck live album, with a version of 'Like Someone in Love' on it, and long sax solos by Paul Desmond? That's what got me hooked on jazz.