Damien Chazelle Quotes

The idea of music is to liberate the listener and lead him to a frame where he feels he is elevated.

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

One of the great things that I loved about doing solo - which I ended up doing because I was too shy to ever try out for bands back in the day - I could sit there with a list of songs and 'paint away' for the show.

Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.

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.

That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.

I get to do my own thing with music. I get to write the songs and sing the songs. As an actor, you have to do what someone else tells you to do and say someone else's words. And you're limited by the way you look and music is just more rewarding creatively for me.

Freedom is the thing that has attracted me most to jazz. Within improvisation, you're really able to express something that maybe I'm not so adept at expressing via language. So I develop a language through the instrument to tell stories. So it's kind of this freedom of thought and freedom of expression that kind happens.

Jazz is something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise... but a way of life.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

Jazz to me is the spirit of freedom. I mean real freedom. Freedom to explore. Freedom to express. Freedom to pour out your guts.

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

Jazz is about freedom within discipline.

When I perform, I like to immerse myself in the music, and I just try to get off on the diversity of music.

That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

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.

I remember seeing McCoy Tyner in concert, and thinking that the music was incredible, but wanting to be invited in. I figured that humor was the way of letting the audience in. I've gotten a hard time about it, but I love to be funny onstage.

You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

I think jazz has given me freedom with my voice.

That's the kind of musical freedom I like: jazz, rock, blues, anything. You adopt different attitudes when you play different music.

The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.

That makes classical music work, the ability to improvise.

Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.