I have a big love for jazz music. The only thing I hated about singing with a jazz band was having to wear a gown to everything.
The podcast 'A History of Jazz' began telling its story in February - 100 years after the recording of 'Livery Stable Blues' by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the start of jazz as a legitimate branch of music.
I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school.
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.
Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.
Playing the sax and then enjoying jazz music, man - it's like I learned how to find words inside of the beat.
I guess certain kinds of jazz music could be Crunk. But the average jazz song, no, it's not Crunk.
I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy.
Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.
If you don't already know about jazz music, how would you be exposed? How would get an opportunity to find out if it spoke to you? If you get exposed to it enough, you might find a taste for it.
Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.
When I worked with my uncle, I loved the fact that jazz music demanded that you use your own unique approach.
People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.
If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.
It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.
It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.
I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.
Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful.
Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.
