Jazz Rhythm Quotes

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

Even though the music I make gathers influences from all over the place, I feel that the core of what I do comes from the jazz tradition. In terms of improvisation, interaction, feel and overall concept, Jazz is my main source of information and inspiration.

My thing was, I loved music. I played music: I played the saxophone. So the little bit of music knowhow I had, I tried to implement that in every thing I did, from my style, my cadence, the way I tried to pause and stagnate it; that all came from John Coltrane and listening to jazz albums. Trying to rhyme like a jazz player.

I think that the jazzy approach that I have is based on the way that I hear music and in the way I play a supporting role to the other people in the band.

I already experimented with free jazz in the 1960s and, in my opinion, to play free jazz, you have to be a perfect musician and a perfect human being - and none of us are!

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

It's just music. It's trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes. The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it. It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible.

Many people don't understand how disciplined you have to be to play jazz... And that is really the idea of democracy - freedom within the Constitution or discipline. You don't just get out there and do anything you want.

I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.

I've always been a jazz fan, but I don't write much about jazz, because I don't have the chops. But it's really, really hard to write about improvised instrumental music when you don't have a good knowledge of harmony and can't identify rhythm signatures very easily either.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

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.

Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden!

If the whole idea, in the original bebop days, was to get to soloing, then that's all it should be about.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

I suppose technically I could say I'm based in jazz, just because it's the school of thought that I've been encouraging myself to operate within.

The rhythm of life is a jazz rhythm

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

I consider myself a jazz singer. I think I stick to the roots of improvisation, singing in front of the beat, behind the beat, playing with notes and harmonies.

Jazz is a hard music, and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that's the most important thing.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

I don't know any jazz stuff. I don't know how to jam in that way. So jamming, for me, is writing a tune.

You have to go out and learn jazz by playing.

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.