Damien Chazelle Quotes

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about jazz.

People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

The people at Jazz at Lincoln Center are an amazing group and have done a phenomenal job teaching kids and audiences of all ages about jazz.

It's funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don't learn jazz in school.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.

I was really trying to sell to people who hate jazz: to make a case for the art form as youthful and energetic, not the sort of rarified intellectual activity it's painted as.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

I've met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they're all funny.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

We don't live in a jazz world, unfortunately. I think if I had lived in a jazz world, I would have done OK. I'm not sure I would have done great. I'm a lover of jazz music, so I would have been happy, don't get me wrong. I go to jazz concerts like the biggest jazz fan in world. The drag is that I don't play jazz for a living.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

I never studied jazz technically; I just know and love the music.

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.