Dave Holland Quotes

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

The main three components are the blues, improvisation - which is some kind of element that people are trying to make it up - and swing, which means even though they're making up music, they're trying to make it up together. It feels great, like you're having a great conversation with somebody.

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

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor.

I was three or four, and my mother would have a Bing Crosby record playing through the house. It was my introduction to jazz, harmonies, melodies, musicianship, and emotion.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

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

They said Bird played bebop, but Bird could still swing. I've heard a lot of guys play bebop, but they wasn't swinging.

Jazz is a beautiful word. I love it.

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

That's the exact concept behind the music: to take that kind of, I guess whatever you want to call it, jazz sensibility - but not have it be about solos.

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

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

The patterns of big-band music are smooth and classical. It's got to be fresh. The brass section should crackle, like the sound of eggs being dropped into hot grease.

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.

To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.

I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

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.