Jazz Quotes

If it sounds good, it is good.

~ Louis Armstrong

It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

~ Miles Davis

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

~ Thelonious Sphere Monk

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

~ Nick La Rocca

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

~ Richie Gerber

Back then he'd hammered out rags as rough as the planks that made up that schoolhouse stage. Over the years he's taken a saw and rasp to those tunes and smoothed them at the edges, sanded them slowly over time with finer and finer grit paper, and applied a polish to them. The songs are comfortable now. People can take their shoes off to dance without fear of a spike in the foot; they can lie back on that smooth and waxed wood to take a nap in the afternoon or make love all night long. Oliver sees himself as a carpenter, a craftsman putting notes and melodies together, fitting them when they will, stepping back to rest and reconsider when they won't.

~ Richard J. Alley

She watched him take the trumpet from its case and fit the mouthpiece. She watched as he raised it to his lips and then, so suddenly, from that tiny cup of metal against his flesh, the sound would burst out like a glorious, brilliant knife dividing the air. And the little room would reverberate and the flies, jolted out of their torpor, would buzz round and round as if riding the swirling notes.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

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

~ Jazz Feylynn

Butterfly upon my hand, A voice of wonder within my mind, not my own but the butterfly's.

~ Jazz Feylynn

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

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A mistake is the most beautiful thing in the world.It is the only way you can get to some place you’venever been before. I try to make as many as I can.Making a mistake is the only way that you cangrow.

~ E.w. Wainwright

The annihilating strokes slashed across my penned heartfelt words.

~ Jazz Feylynn

…he didn’t needs words or even want them because he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear.

~ Toni Morrison

I don’t want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man.”“Don’t we all. Look. Be what you want--- white or black. Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning draw your manhood up—quicklike, and don’t bring me no whiteboy sass.” Hunter’s Hunter and Godlen Gray

~ Toni Morrison

They call it music, but it's just this side of magic.

~ Harold Jones

Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lostmemories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreamsplay when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Call me crazy, but there is something terribly wrong with this city.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomachin a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in thedarkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

Did Bach ever eatpancakes at midnight?

~ Nathan Reese Maher

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.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

I steal one glance over my shoulder as soon as we are far from the foreboding luminance of the neon glow, and it is there that my stomach leaps into my throat. Squatting just shy of the light and partially concealed by the shade of an alley is a sinister silhouette beneath a crimson cowl, beaming a demonic smile which spans from cheek to swollen cheek.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

She leaves my side and heads deeper intothe apartment singing, “—if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… acopper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

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.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their rightmind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what youshould name it.

~ Nathan Reese Maher

A spiritual journey is becoming what one has always meant to be-come and always was. One with God's Spirit.

~ Jazz Feylynn

And the sculptors will shape the soil for the writers to stretch the seedsfor the patient painters who sketch the petals they will shade in alabaster and gold. Their sweat is the rain. Maybe the jazzman will send us a rose.

~ Kristen Henderson

Not long after we started working for him I asked Bernard if he thought Thatcher was evil,'I said. 'He said it was like asking what jazz is.

~ Jack Womack

After a few sips, he picked up his sax and started jamming with the storm.Most days, Rivers meditated twice, when he awoke and again in the evening before writing or reading. But he still found a special relaxation and renewal in solitary playing. Contemplation through music was different from other reflective experiences, in part, because his visual associations were set free to mutate, morph, and meander; while the other senses were occupied in fierce concentraction on breathing, blowing, fingering, and listening. Within the flow of this activity, his awareness would land in different states of consciousness, different phases of time, and easily moved between revisualization of experience and its creation.The playing dislodged hidden feelings, primed him for recognizing the habitually denied, sheathed the sword of lnaguage, and loosened the shield and armor of his character. His contemplative playing purged him of worrisome realities, smelted off from his center the dross of eperience, and on those rare and cherished days, left only the refinement of flickering fire. Although he was more aware of his emotions, the music and dance of thought kept them at arm’s length, Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.” . . .As he played, his mind’s eye became the fisher’s bobber, guided by a line of sound around the driftwood of thought, the residue of his life, which materialized from nowhere and sank back into nothingness without his weaving them into any insistent pattern of order and understanding. He was momentarily freed of logical sequencing, the press of premises, the psycho-logic of primary process, the throb of Thought pulsing in and through him, and in billions of mind/bodies, now and throughout time, belonging each to each, to none, to no one, to Everyone, rocking back and forward in an ebb and flow of wishes, fears, and goals. He fished free of desire, illusion, or multiplicity; distant from the hook, the fisher, the fish; but tethered still on the long line of music, until it snagged on an immovable object, some unquestioned assumption, or perhaps a stray consummation, a catch in the flow of creation and wonder.

~ Jay Richards

Those who have not lived in New Orleans have missed an incredible, glorious, vital city--a place with an energy unlike anywhere else in the world, a majority-African American city where resistance to white supremacy has cultivated and supported a generous, subversive, and unique culture of vivid beauty. From jazz, blues, and and hip-hop to secondlines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and the citywide tradition of red beans and rice on Monday nights, New Orleans is a place of art and music and food and traditions and sexuality and liberation.

~ Jordan Flaherty

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

~ Jazz Feylynn

Twist a tongue, and tongue a twist how many twists can a tongue twister twist around their twisting tongue. If a tongue twister's tongue could twist, how many twists would the tongue twister's tongue twist while their tongue was a twisting.

~ Jazz Feylynn

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

~ Peter Watts

Welcome to Book-a-holic Anonymous.Hi, I'm Jazz and I am addicted to the written word. I love the smell of the blackest ink sliding across texture paper. My eyes squint against the loss of time within the pages of story. I don't think there's a cure for my compulsion to lose myself within life and times of those characters bound between the covers.

~ Jazz Feylynn

The ink line drawing flowed the cursive journey,created on paper canvas that brought the story to life.

~ Jazz Feylynn

Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape somewhere. Well, none of the musicians have played together. You can’t play jazz music that way. In order for you to play jazz, you’ve got to listen to them. The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking and for you to interact with them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out. And that’s how our music really could teach what the meaning of American democracy is.

~ Wynton Marsalis

The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o’clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or that would make Louis Armstrong travel around the world for fifty plus years non stop, just get up out of his sick bed, crawl up on the bandstand and play, the thing that would make Duke Ellington, the thing that would make Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams, the thing that would make all of these people give their lives for this, and they did give their lives, is that it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself. And this music tells you that it will become itself. And when you get a taste of that, there’s just nothing else you’re going to taste that’s as sweet.

~ Wynton Marsalis

Don't make a career out of underestimating me. — Claire de Haven

~ James Ellroy

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 . . .

~ Carew Papritz

Tongue and hand tied, I was equally cut off and trapped in my own silent dark tomb.

~ Jazz Feylynn