Damien Chazelle Quotes

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.

Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.

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.

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.

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.

If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.

I haven't a great jazz band, and I don't want one.

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

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

Whatever it is, music should sound spontaneous, I've derived a great deal of pleasure from playing jazz and having the knowledge of that spontaneity.

You can start from any source material, and you can approach it with a jazz ear, and then it will become a jazz moment.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.

I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.

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

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

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

I used to play too with a boy who played a saxophone. We didn't play no blues, we'd play a lot of love songs - 'Stardust', 'Blue Moon', 'Out Cold Again', 'Sophisticated Lady', 'Stars Fell On Alabama', a lot of different stuff.

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

There's the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.