New Orleans Jazz Quotes

In the Bay Area, there was a resurgence of Dixieland jazz in the '40s - there was the Frisco Jazz Band, and Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band.

I'm all into Jazz; I'm into New Orleans type music. There is country, there is southern gospel. I'm a huge southern gospel fan.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea.

Of course my uncle was a giant, but my dad, in particular, had the house filled with these great Dixieland jazz stars, really the best of them: Henry Red Allen, Willie 'The Lion' Smith, Buster Bailey, Cutty Cutshall, Tyree Glenn, Zutty Singleton. These are all big names in the Dixieland world.

Well I went to New Orleans to cover the jazz festival for Trio, it's this new arts channel, it's really great.

Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

My music is homegrown from the garden of New Orleans. Music is everything to me short of breathing. Music also has a role to lift you up - not to be escapist but to take you out of misery.

If you listen to Louis Armstrong from 1929, you will never hear anything better than that really, and you will never hear anything more free than that.

If I have to be considered any type of jazz artist, it would be New Orleans jazz because New Orleans jazz never forgot that jazz is dance music and jazz is fun. I'm more influenced by that style of jazz than anything else.

If anybody was Mr. Jazz it was Louis Armstrong. He was the epitome of jazz and always will be. He is what I call an American standard, an American original.

I grew up in the Great Depression, and the jazz artists and Dixieland musicians were at the core of our communications and enjoyment. They were not passing fancies. They are something that is, and will be, listened to again and again. I have a space of reverence for some of those old jazz stars such as Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong.

I'm proud to acknowledge my debt to the 'Reverend Satchelmouth' ... He is the beginning and the end of music in America

I've always been in love with that Delta-flavored music... the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto.

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

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've always found some way to kind of incorporate second-line music in what I did.

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.

I forget what the official name of it was, but they did an all-day of roots music - every kind of music you can imagine from around the country - New Orleans Jazz to Indian flute players, R&B, you name it. I met and became good friends with (blues guitar player) Joe Louis Walker. He was on the show.

New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.

I always have a little bit of Brazil and New Orleans in my band.

There's definitely that tribal Africana thing going on in my sound. It's that marching band, second-line music, that Creole-influence in the kick, and the snare that drives everything for me. I think it's really what's separated my sound from a lot of the R&B and pop music out there.

In New Orleans, you can pitch a rock and hit a great trumpeter.

The Batiste family is a large musical family in Louisiana, out in New Orleans. People go to New Orleans, and if they go to any club, four days out of the week I guarantee you that you will find a Batiste playing in the ensemble.

I don't dig that two-beat jive the New Orleans cats play. My boys and I have to have four heavy beats to the bar and no cheating.