Free Jazz Quotes

#1. Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano. She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz.

Jon Pareles

#2. Footballers can be like artists when the mind and body are working as one. It is what Miles Davis does when he plays free jazz - everything pulls together into one intense moment that is beautiful.

Lilian Thuram

#3. In my teenage years I was as addicted to great pop as I was to free jazz, electronic music, and hardcore blues.

Scott Walker

#4. In Detroit, it was an average night to go and hear the Stooges, Parliament-Funkadelic and the MC5 on the same show. We were all into the 'Free Jazz' movement, the musics of Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra; and experimenting with guitar sounds, and trying different beats, and pushing the rhythm farther...

Wayne Kramer

#5. A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.

Brian Eno

#6. The numerous ecstatic traditions - including free jazz and funk - have all been great inspirations.

David First

#7. I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

Brian Eno

#8. We feel fighting for dominance actually shows weakness. It's much harder to hold back the wolf than to let it have free rein.

Jazz Feylynn

#9. It's dangerous to assert oneself.

Jeanne Moreau

#10. I think about the sincerity of my writing. I try to be true, to pose questions. Shake people up a bit and make them look in a direction they wouldn't normally.

Philippe Claudel

#11. I'm a man who falls in love so easily, and with such reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer.

Michael Chabon

#12. I was used to dancing, but only when someone told you what to do. So in the nightclub I was all over the place, I combined everything. Street dance, modern dance, a bit of jazz and ballet, I was Twyla Tharp, I was Alvin Ailey, I was Michael Jackson. I didn't care, I was free.

Madonna Ciccone

#13. I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.

Nat Wolff

#14. Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all. So, I'm not really a fan of Free music. Having said that, Jazz is based on individual expression and I'm compelled to respect the Free player's option to express himself as he chooses.

Pete La Roca

#15. Can I throw harder than Joe Wood? Listen mister, no man alive can throw any harder than Smokey Joe Wood.

Walter Johnson

#16. I don't listen to a lot of music when I have my free time. But I'll go to a jazz club and have a drink and listen to a good jazz musician. Or sometimes in the morning, if I want to put myself in a good mood, I'll put on some Latin music.

Joshua Bell

#17. The braid is always stronger than the strand.

Ryan Graudin

#18. 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

#19. The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.

Ken Burns

#20. Now as jazz musicians we're saying for this society, you can free up your imagination. You can proceed in an area without much information and you can function in an area without much information.

Paul Bley

#21. I'll never be yours until you're mine

Nalini Singh

#22. That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Billy Crystal

#23. When you don't have a future, you act different. You don't plan. You don't try. You just... exist

Sarah Fine

#24. If we may credit certain hints contained in the lives of the saints, love raises the spirit above the sphere of reverence and worship into one of laughter and dalliance: a sphere in which the soul says: 'Shall I, a gnat which dances in Thy ray, Dare to be reverent?'

Coventry Patmore

#25. Free form jazz means absolutely nothing to me. Because there are no boundaries.

Jon Lord

#26. When I was a kid, I wanted desperately to be a jazz musician. I would practice the trumpet for hours, but when I got braces, that messed up my ability to play, so all of a sudden I had all this free time.

Zach Woods

#27. Al Kaline bought a tee and a ball and swung at it all winter. Look where it got him: the Hall of Fame.

Hal Newhouser

#28. Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.

Mary Catherine Bateson

#29. I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world.

David Sanborn

#30. Regarding jam sessions: Jazz musicians are the only workers I can think of who are willing to put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.

George Carlin