David Simon Quotes

The music is just so rich and part of the culture there. I suddenly felt like I needed to go on this mission to make sure we save New Orleans because - not that I can save anything - but it's so much part of what this country is, this whole mix of people coming together and doing this thing.

I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.

Music has an intrinsic value that touches Americans - they love their music, and want more.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

Jazz, and the history of jazz, is the history of America.

I really got back to my New Orleans roots - my grandfather played with Fats Domino. We had to leave after Katrina, but I feel like, spiritually, I'm back there.

The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

Hip-hop is bigger than the South; hip-hop is bigger than New York.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Progressive music probably wouldn't even really exist if not for the people of the United States having picked up on it and nurtured it in the way they did. It really is an American form of music in the sense that it was nurtured here. So it belongs here. It has become part of the fabric of American musical culture.

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive character.

Rock n' roll really belongs to all America. It really doesn't belong to one city.

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

From chain gangs to folk songs to intelligent soul, America has created musicians dedicated to truth, justice, and a better American Way.

Most people don't know that Congo Square was originally a Muscogee ceremonial ground... in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz.

I think The Meters are like The Beatles to us in New Orleans, you know.

I don't know what America would be without New Orleans and the music.

Soul and blues were a definite influence on me. It was raw and naked emotion which you didn't get much where I come from.