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
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
(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
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
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
