Nat Wolff Quotes

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.

I mean, in the course of an evening, people will take a solo here and there, but generally it's all about the rhythm of that music. Dealing with the rhythm with everything. That's essentially at least my concept of what that group is.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

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

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

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

I always find that there is a real communication between voice and violin.

I'm improvising all the time. Everything I do is improvised. On the piano, at least.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

Where words fail, music speaks.

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

Music is like a conversation. One person says one thing that speaks with a harmonica, with a bass, with a drum. They're all conversating, and we're just trying to find a way to make conversation rather than blah, blah, blah. But it's not really so hard a thing to do if you know the way to approach it.

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

Music is the social act of communication among people, a gesture of friendship, the strongest there is.

I love the sound of the saxophone. It became my singing voice, and it sounds so human. The saxophone could carry the words past the border of words. It can carry it a little bit farther.

I don't work out a lead section and practice it for a day and then lay it down. I don't do that. The first time I do something I think is expressive or really cool, that's what's actually on the recording.

Well, jazz is to me, a complete lifestyle. It's bigger than a word. It's a much bigger force than just something that you can say. It's something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

Jazz told people about the special music that came out of America and about America in general and this kind of liberty and freedom that we have.

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.