A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.
Steve LacyRead
Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.
Interpretation
Jazz music embodies the idea of taking risks, where each note represents an opportunity for creativity and expression.
This quote by Steve Lacy highlights the improvisational nature of jazz music, where musicians must embrace the uncertainty of each note they choose to play. In jazz, the element of risk is essential to the art form, as it allows for innovation and the creation of unique musical experiences that can only arise when artists venture beyond the safe and predictable.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of creativity in the arts.
A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.
Play difficult and interesting things. If you play boring things, you risk losing your appetite. Saxophone can be tedious with too much of the same.
The writing of the Beatles, or John and Paul's contribution to the Beatles in the late sixties - had a kind of depth to it, a more mature, more intellectual approach. We were different people, we were older. We knew each other in all kinds of different ways than when we wrote together as teenagers and in our older twenties.
It's not just songs and glamour. It's sweat, blood, broken toes, and mistakes... It's life.
The dissolution of the pictorial into sheer texture, into apparently sheer sensation, into an accumulation of repetitions, seems to speak for and answer something profound in contemporary sensibility.
It's wonderful to play a villain who gets a laugh or to stop a comedy dead in its tracks with a touching moment. It's kind of like a symphony that has very different movements.
Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed.
Self expression is the new entertainment, We never used to question why people sit on the couch for seven hours a day watching bad TV. Nobody ever asked, Why are they doing that for free? We need to celebrate [this desire to contribute for free] rather than question it.
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