Jazz Quotes

We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don’t just say I’m grown and ought to know. I don’t. I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want… well, I didn’t always… now I want. I want some fat in this life.”“Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it.”“You don’t know either, do you?”“I know enough to know how to behave.”“Is that it? Is that all it is?”“Is that all what is?”“Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?”“Oh, Mama.” Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth. Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn’t do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking? - Violet Trace and Alice Manfred

Now listen for your song. Everybody’s got a song. When I used to chase the Trane— John Coltrane that is— he used to tell me, ‘If I know a man’s sound, I know the man.’ Do you hear the melody playing in your mind? Does it move you, nudge you off your seat?

Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy.

My God, what a sensation to be an atom in the scheme of such grandiosity. The allurement, the jazz, and the physics of it all . . .

When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.

Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.

History doesn’t start with a tall buildingand a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is takingus for suckers and is playing a mean game.

I assumed this yoke would encase me as well as any another hobble. Only this one bound the mind.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

The guitar poured out its soul, its history, its dreams, its pain, its victories, its secrets. The guitar’s strings purred with blues and ended with a haunting solitary song with no lyrics.

In Jazz, like in America, the group works together toward a common cause with lots of room left for each individual to shine.

The static’s nice. I could do without the screechi

Twist a tongue, and tongue a twist how many twists can a tongue twister twist around the twisting tongue.

As I’ve said before, “the Mod generation”, contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don’t care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so —from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz.

An inch of gold can't buy an inch of time

The 'magic' is the known and unknown quiet, spiritual, invisible thread which links and reveals harmonic elements to a universe of high vibrational sensory. And our beloved Bro. Maurice David knew it's undeniable creative power, from within.

I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.

In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue and a blessing.

Jazz was about the spaces between notes. It was about what happened when you listened to the thing inside you. The gaps and the cracks. Because that was where life really happened, when you were brave enough to free-fall.

What is my definition of jazz? 'Safe sex of the highest order.

But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and window glass doors in fury at her certain answers. [15-16]