Jazz music is a lifestyle. It's not notes, chords and arpeggios. Today's improvisation is too based on the knowledge of chords and the way they practice the chords. It's not a melodic thing anymore like the older days. It was much more important to play shorter and to play more variable, valid stuff. Today, a lot of solos are long and uninteresting and the influence usually comes from John Coltrane's group. He himself was a master musician, but he put so much emphasis on chord knowledge and technique, and now the kids want to show how fast they can play. This is the same with piano players and most instrumentalists-it's speed. That's gonna change again and hopefully the kids who are now 16 and 17 years old have a little more sense and maybe some more stories to tell.
Joe ZawinulRelated topics
change comes emphasis improvisation john knowledge master music now piano play practice sense show speed technique tell thing variable way today years jazz days lifestyle NOTESRelated quotes
The Apollonian and Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism -- heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism -- frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. ... The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.
Camille Paglia
A presumption of equality may be contrary to present fact, and yet not contrary to a desideratum. We are not as a fact all equally fit to live, equally responsible, or equally deserving of the protection of the law: but it will hardly be doubted that it would be desirable if we were.
But further, the presumption of a desired condition is, in any group of plastic minds, a force tending to bring about the thing presumed, i. e., to create it. It aids a boy to reach maturity to treat him as if he were a little older than he is. A little older: for the presumption loses its effect if it is too wide of the actual fact. The fundamental presumptions of the law are justified on this basis and to this extent: if they are too wide of the truth to be creative, they are not justified.
William Ernest Hocking
John F. Kennedy ... murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy - maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows? A whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question. JFK's ghost will haunt the corridors of power in America for as long as the grass is green and the rivers run to the sea. Take my word for it, Bubba. I have heard his footsteps for 30 years and I still feel guilty about not being able to explain the biggest news story of my lifetime to my son.
Hunter S. Thompson
And yet I don't know. And yet I don't know!
The handkerchiefs that cost me three shillings or so -
And that seems a lot for poor Uncle John
And anything goes to blow noses on. Talking of noses, hers is red enough.
I know what I'll buy her. A nice powder puff. Now she can't powder her nose with a grand piano.
Nor yet with a sewing machine.
She can't powder her nose with an Ingersoll watch -
Well that's silly, you know what I mean.
She can't powder her nose with a jumper.
She'll find that a little bit rough.
So I'll pop round to Woolworth's tomorrow, God bless her
And buy her a nice powder puff. And yet I don't know. And yet I don't know!
Sixpence ha'pennies aren't found in back yards.
I'll not buy her a powder puff at all - no.
I'll just send her my kindest regards.
Stanley Holloway
It is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today's decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact-and the furthest extension one can even imagine-of the Court's claimed power to create "liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
Antonin Scalia