Quotes about jazz

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

— Isadora Duncan

What kills me is that everybody thinks I like jazz.

— Samuel L. Jackson

The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.

— Imamu Amiri Baraka Jones

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.

— B. B. King

There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.

— Pat Metheny

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

— Francoise Sagan

Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

— Studs Terkel

Jazz is the art of skipping obvious convention while still following it.

— Eric Parslow