As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.
Jazz was the pop music of its day, and all American popular music has stemmed from it one way or another.
There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.
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 still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.
I find early jazz to be the most revolutionary music of its time.
All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.
Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.
One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
Jazz in the 1920s and '30s was dance music, teenage music for parties, for being wild and young. There's this punk feeling I really love. It was something so radical and different and new and not codified. People didn't have a definition of what they were doing.