Damien Chazelle Quotes

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.

Jazz was more of a tool for me to use to enhance my musicality.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

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.

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.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.

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 an interesting music. It's one of the few forms of music where everyone that's performing the music has a creative stake in the music. In jazz, everyone's improvising, and everyone's creating at the same time.

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

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.

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.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.

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

This is what really makes real jazz musicians: people coming out with their own voice.

If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about.

Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

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

I hear many extra-musical things somehow in Coltrane.