QUOTES from Jazz Theory Tests and other quotes about jazz, creativity, chaos and order.
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.
-Wynton Marsalis
The fundamental fact is this: For an athlete to fulfill his or her potential, particularly in a sport as demanding as baseball, a remarkable degree of mental and moral discipline is required. (try substituting 'musician' or 'person' for 'athlete', and 'jazz' or 'life' for 'baseball' in the previous sentence.) -George Will
Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself. -Chinese Proverb
It gets to the point where the player, if he's going to be any kind of serious player, teaches himself. -Bill Evans.
Chance favors the prepared man. -Douglas MacArthur
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -Aristotle
(Jazz) can be learned, but it can't be taught.
-Paul Desmond
By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with. -Duke Ellington
Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man,
jazz is jazz.
-Louis Armstrong
Jazz is America's
classical music.
-Dr. Billy Taylor
Hitler banned the saxophone from Germany on two counts. He claims the sax is not a legitimate instrument and
that it disrupts the
morals of the people.
-The Metronome, 1933
JAZZ: INAPPROPRIATE FOR THE CLASSROOM:
-H. A. Feldman, MENC Journal, 1964.
(Jazz) is trite and transient music.
Who can deny the close association between jazz and delinquency?
Higgeldy-piggeldy runs, ugly tone, barely struck notes all are what now constitutes modern artistry?
(Jazz) makes an art of vulgarity; is monotonous; pornographic, and often outrageously funny; and is replete with intellectual and cultural pretensions.
-Ernest Bacon, 1960
Jazz is not dead,
it just smells funny.
-Frank Zappa
Paint what you know,
not what you see.
-Picasso
Play what you hear,
not what you know.
-Miles Davis
You have to know 400 notes that you can play, then pick the right four. -Miles Davis
There are no wrong notes in jazz: only notes in the wrong places. -Miles Davis
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
If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.
-Yogi Berra
Jazz opposes to our classical conception of music a strange and subversive chaos of sounds . . . it is a fashion and, as such,
destined some day to disappear. -Igor Stravinsky
In the long run I think it's more important to look at paintings than study the way somebody plays bebop lines. -Jim Hall
We start out playing by ear, learning everything we can,
and finally ending up playing by ear again. -Lee Konitz
What survives every change of system is melody. -Igor Stravinsky
Melody is the very essence of music. -Mozart
Music was originally discreet, seemly, simple, masculine, and of good morals. Have not the moderns rendered it lascivious beyond measure? -Jacob of Liege, 1425
Nature contains the elements, in color and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick and choose, and group with science, these elements . . . as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony.
-James Whistler, 1911
The arts cannot thrive except where men are free to be themselves and to be in charge of the discipline of their own energies and ardors. The conditions for democracy and for the arts are one and the same. What we call liberty in politics results in freedom in the arts. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too. -FDR, 1939
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. -Pablo Picasso
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. -Pablo Picasso
I will teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for in the patterns of music and all the arts are the keys to learning.
-Plato
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
-Victor Hugo
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
-Aldous Huxley
You only have real freedom when you set boundaries and parameters. When you have total freedom, you automaticlly create chaos. -Nadia Boulanger
Chaos is a friend of mine. -Bob Dylan
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. -Igor Stravinsky
The tonal structures we call music bear a close logical similarity to the forms of human feeling-forms of growth and attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement, calm, or subtle activation and dreamy lapses-not joy and sorrow, perhaps, but the poignancy of either and both-the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt. Such is the pattern, or logical form, of sentience; and the pattern of music is that same form worked out in pure measured sound and silence. Music is the tonal analogue of life. (Langer, 1953)
There is nothing in life that you can't parallel with the tensions and volume and movement of music. (Jarrett, 1979)
A number of well-informed American musicians feel that the proclivity to 'teach' jazz in a formal classroom situation and force it into rigid molds of academia is a sign that jazz is ceasing to be a spontaneous, living art. (Lehman, 1964)
Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them. -Richard Strauss
No one is original. Everyone is derivative. -Sonny Rollins
Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz. -Sonny Rollins
Creativity:
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
-Joseph Chilton Pearce
Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with it apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. -Norman Podhoretz
Others Quotes to share? make us think? send them to me:
For more information e-mail Bert Ligon at
bligon@mozart.sc.edu
Phone: 803.777.6565/803.777.4280
