Jazz on Wikipedia

“There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.”

“The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it’s still a melody.”

“It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.”

“My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often—in fact, mostly—at the expense of everything else in my life.”

- Stan Getz

For those of you who aren't familiar with Getz, I urge you to dig up some of his stuff and really check it out.

I love Wikipedia. The jazz entry has a comprehensive history of jazz. There's more though - you can click on any word in blue and it'll link to an entry on that word. This format is right in line with my flowing stream of consiousness (a nice way to say that my mind wanders off topic a lot).

Click on the title of this post for the link to that page, or copy and paste the url below into your browser.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz

L8R


Bandleader sends his son to take piano lessons. The teacher's first question was whether the boy knew the scale, to which he replied, "Oh, yes,ma'am--$150 for the leader and $75 for the sidemen."