Jason Moran Quotes

Whatever's going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn't happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I'm writing 'Inglourious Basterds,' and I'm in love with a girl and we break up, that's going to find its way into the piece.

I don't think I'm turning back the clock by doing these old tunes. I love rock and roll and popular music. It's just that the spirits of the singers whose songs I do are living within me. That's why the songs come out in the voices of the original singers. I'm not doing imitations. That's the way they sound inside me.

I believe, as artists, I do think we have a responsibility, and there's also a place for a lot of different artists. It is nice when music captures the honesty of the time but also what we're going through in that moment.

My dad [Johnny Cash] went to the [Richard] Nixon White House and refused to sing "Welfare Cadillac" (instead performing the anti-war songs "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" and "Man in Black"). He protested the Vietnam War, but he went to perform for the troops with bombs dropping all around him. He had that kind of genius: a true artist's capacity for holding two opposing thoughts at once while being large enough to encompass all realities.

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

We want to show how hip-hop, which kind of fuels today's basketball stars, is directly related to jazz.

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

Politics has always been in my music. Anybody who doesn't understand how political "Copperhead Road" is isn't listening very well.

In music the mystical element is definitely there all the time, and one can see it. When it comes to rock and roll, when it comes to any kind of industry, it's not there. It's not there. So it's a battle between the two. Music, Industry.

Actors are responsible to the people we play. I don't label or judge. I just play them as honestly and expressively and creatively as I can.

I thank God for Hip Hop because Marvin Gaye didn't have that and he was able to be that dope. For us to have that and more, I feel like it is up to us to be as dope as we can possibly be.

Criticism - however valid or intellectually engaging - tends to get in the way of a writer who has anything personal to say. A tightrope walker may require practice, but if he starts a theory of equilibrium he will lose grace (and probably fall off).

We as artists cannot be politicians. We as artists can only be truth-tellers.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don't know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how. But I couldn't responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I'm just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

You really can't be a good artist if you can't say what you really feel. And people may be offended, but, you know, that's how you feel, and that is your right, and that is your gift as well.

The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.

And when no hope was left inside on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do. But I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.

I don't think you necessarily have to be the most perfected performer, in order to express your feelings. It's really those feelings that an audience connects with, I think, at least as much as perfected technical skill.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

I'm not in competition with nobody. I want to make good music for my fans who want it, who enjoy it, who learn something from it. And that's what it is.