Jazz Criticism Quotes

I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

Free form jazz means absolutely nothing to me. Because there are no boundaries.

People who love jazz musicians love us when we play what we want to play and we're starving. But as soon as you commercialize your sound like Wes Montgomery did, the jazz fans and the critics are down on you!

Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles.

To most jazz critics I was basically Kenny G.

I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to listen to it.

The chief trouble with jazz is that there is not enough of it; some of it we have to listen to twice.

I don't like to hear someone put down dixieland. Those people who say there's no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know.

I don't like freedom jazz - I think it's void of roots and void of foundation.

Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism.

It is my belief that there is a tendency among the so-called 'modern' or 'hip' jazz musicians to consider styles other that their own, 'corny', and it is my contention that in actuality it is these musicians who are producing that which in future years perceptive critics will deem 'corny'.

I once took a ride to the beach in L.A., and all along the shore there were all these so-called jazz places. And I saw these college guys and session players playing this fusion Muzak stuff. It was just a lot of notes, and the more notes they played, the more it kept them from expressing anything. So I came back home and got out my Zeppelin albums.

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

I think the blues is fine for blues players, but free blues has never made much sense to me.

It's sort of what jazz would be if it stopped being snobby and what rock would be if it stopped being stupid.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

I don't enjoy jazz guitar in general. I don't enjoy listening to a lot of it. I don't enjoy the tone. In general I've found its role in jazz to be kind of difficult.

I like jazz, but I could never play it. You just sit there with a guitar the size of a Chevy on your chest, wearing a stupid hat, playing the same solo for an hour.

I was co-editor of the magazine called The Jazz Review, which was a pioneering magazine because it was the only magazine, then or now, in which all the articles were written by musicians, by jazz men. They had been laboring for years under the stereotype that they weren't very articulate except when they picked up their horn.

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.

But sometimes that title 'jazz' can vex people who think they know exactly what jazz always is and will be.

I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about jazz.