Damien Chazelle Quotes

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

Part of what I like to do with Brainfeeder is to get the younger kids hearing jazz, because they don't know where to go to really hear it. Brainfeeder gives me a platform to put out people like Kamasi Washington or Austin Peralta.

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

The history of jazz for the last 45 years has come through the Monterey Jazz Festival stages. I think there's developed a legacy and an aura around the festival.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

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

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

I just don't know anything about jazz, really. I've never really listened to it, but I'd definitely like to discover more about it.

I've met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they're all funny.

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

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

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

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

I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

But sometimes that title 'jazz' can vex people who think they know exactly what jazz always is and will be.

The people at Jazz at Lincoln Center are an amazing group and have done a phenomenal job teaching kids and audiences of all ages about jazz.

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.

If you don't already know about jazz music, how would you be exposed? How would get an opportunity to find out if it spoke to you? If you get exposed to it enough, you might find a taste for it.

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

Now is a good time, 10 years ago would have been a good time, and 10 years from now it will still be a good time to see a dynamic, entertaining movie that's wall-to-wall Miles Davis where the music will hopefully spark some desire to know more about the man.

I missed jazz, kind of. And by the time I came to it in life, it was too intimidating to enjoy thoroughly.