Quote of the Day

The depth of your pain will always be equal to the depth of your love.

-- Shannon L. Alder

Quote of the Day

I can't think of Billie Holiday without tears coming to my eye.  There was always something of pain, always something that was heartbreaking in her rendition.  And she wasn't only talking about her own heartbreak.  She was talking about yours, too.  The thing that joined us, you know, was the common concept that the misery she was singing, you know, was one that included us and embraced us all.

-- Ossie Davis, Jazz

Quote of the Day

And for some reason I rather thought that black people actually captured that very well in music was this kind of loneliness in the human condition that no matter how much you yearn for community and yearn for community, in the end there is this loneliness and there's no way you can escape it.  And that's to me, what the best jazz when you hear a soloist often, especially in a slow piece or a ballad piece, that's sort of what the best jazz, to me has always felt like.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

When you hear Billie Holiday sing, you hear the spirit of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong together in a person.  So you have the fire of the blues shouter.  You have the intelligent choice of notes like a great jazz musician like Louis Armstrong.  But you have, with her, a very profound sensitivity to the human condition.  She tells you something about the pain of the blues, of life, but inside of that pain is a toughness and that's what you're attracted to.

-- Wynton Marsalis, Jazz

Quote of the Day

The big band music was popular because first it comes out of the soil of the country.  It has the happiness and joy of the sound of jazz in it.  It was at a certain time in the country where you have a certain sophistication and a belief in adult sensibility.

-- Wynton Marsalis, Jazz

Quote of the Day

It's orchestrated Louis [Armstrong], that's what the swing era is.

-- Gary Giddins, Jazz

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I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

-- Duke Ellington

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And overnight, (Benny Goodman) walks into the American parlor with jazz by the scruff of its neck.  And all of a sudden, jazz, which was almost a cult music, has become American popular music.  And that's what Goodman did.

--James Maher, Jazz

Quote of the Day

Song is the wind chime of memory...

--James Maher, Jazz

Quote of the Day

People needed dance music maybe more than ever in America [in the 1930s] because the country was in such doldrums.  So, I think people needed the escape of going to the Savoy and to those other places to dance.  They needed those bands.  As an antidote to the Depression, I think swing music did as much as MGM musicals to help America through.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

In the mid-1930s, as the Great Depression stubbornly refused to lift, jazz came as close as it has ever come to being America's popular music.  It had a new name now, swing, and its impact was revolutionary.  Swing rescued the recording industry.  In 1932, just 10 million records had been sold in the United States.  By 1939, that number would grow to 50 million.

-- Jazz

Quote of the Day

(Creating jazz) was a way for people to break with the old.  It was a way to break from Europe, it was a way to break from Old Victorian mores, it was to break from a whole bunch of other stuff.  It was sort of clean in that respect, and America no longer had to look back to its past, no longer had to look back to Europe or anything else.  The blacks when they invented this music weren't looking back to Africa, they were looking at America and looking at the future, and looking at what they were as Americans.  Europeans who came to this country and became Americans were attracted to this music, found in this music a way to break from Europe.  Finally, the Emersonian doctrine of "Create your art here" from The American Scholar finally came into fruition with this music.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

The blues are about freedom....there's a liberation and reality and...when they talk about being sad...the fact that you recognize that which, which pains you is a very freeing and liberating experience.  It's just, it must be strange for other cultures where you spend most of your time trying to pretend like you don't have any of these problems or any of these, you know, situations.

-- Branford Marsalis, Jazz

Quote of the Day

The blues could be about anything: a beautiful woman, a mean boss, the devil himself.  But they were always intensely personal, meant to make the listener feel better, not worse.

-- Jazz

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(Blues) lyrics may have been tragic in their orientation, but the music was about having a good time.  So, the music was really a matter of stomping the blues away.

-- Albert Murray, Jazz

Quote of the Day

There was a big difference between having the blues and playing the blues 'coz playing the blues was a matter of getting rid of the blues.

-- Albert Murray, Jazz

Quote of the Day

Black people since the end of the Civil War were searching for an aesthetic.  They're searching for an aesthetic that will free them of minstrelsy, freedom of the burden of minstrelsy, freedom of the degradation of minstrelsy.  What emerges from that is a form called the "Blues" and it's a very useful form.  It's elastic.  You can do a lot with it because it's simple.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

The blues is about sculpting meaning out of a situation that seems to defy you're being able to find meaning in it.

-- Gerald Early, Jazz

Quote of the Day

(Jazz) is America's music.  Born out of a million American negotiations; between having and not having; between happy and sad; country and city; between black and white; and men and women; between the old Africa and the old Europe, that could only have happened in an entirely new world.  It is an improvisational art, making itself up as it goes along, just like the country that gave it birth.

-- Jazz

Quote of the Day

Some people are damaged.  And damaged people damage people.

-- Steve Maraboli

Quote of the Day

The reality is that you will grieve forever.  You will not "get over" the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.  You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered.  You will be whole again but you will never be the same.  Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.

-- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler