It's something that - jazz is one of the few things that you can go and listen to, I don't care where you're from, what you are, what background you come from - there's something there for you.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.
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.
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 to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.
If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.
Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.
Jazz sometimes can be really complicated and inaccessible to people because they don't know what to start with. You can start with something that you love, but if you start with something that you hate, then it's like, 'You know what, I hate jazz.' It took me a lot of time to catch on to jazz, too.
What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.
I just don't know anything about jazz, really. I've never really listened to it, but I'd definitely like to discover more about it.