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
It's orchestrated Louis [Armstrong], that's what the swing era is.
-- Gary Giddins, Jazz
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
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
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
(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
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
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
(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
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
