Quotes about Jazz

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

The song 'Leroy and Lanisha' on my album 'The Epic' is really my homage to 'Linus and Lucy.'

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.

The voluptuous chords of the wedding march done in blasphemous syncopation issued in a delirious blend from the trombones and saxophones--and

My audience went, 'Wait, why is she singing jazz? What's going on?' And then they went, 'Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.' And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

Jazz is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.

I used to tell my friends, 'Art Blakey is way more gangster than Eazy-E!' I ended up getting my friends into jazz, and all of a sudden there was this little group of kids in the middle of South Central that were all into hard-bop.

I would sit in at a jazz brunch [at sweet Basil] with Eddie Chamblee, who was a great tenor player. Really a kind man. The whole band was great.