That's the thing: There are so many art songs in jazz. It's a much more rich experience for the singer than people think.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.
Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.
I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.
Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.
I've been a massive obsessive about jazz singers all my life.
If I had to look at 'Now He Sings'... from outside myself, I see it as a natural part of the growth of the jazz culture, which I've always been so happy - honored, really - to be a small part of.
The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.
I was brought up in a house with a lot of appreciation for music, all kinds of music, including jazz. But I never knew that it could really be a career. I didn't know any jazz singers. I never saw live jazz. I only heard these records.
Jazz infers a style, but creative music has a wider field and wider specification about it. We know it from people like Scott Joplin and on through Bessie Smith.
I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.