Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.
A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.
The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.
'Amores Perros' is rock, '21 Grams' is jazz, 'Babel' is an opera, and 'Biutiful' is a requiem.
It was liberating to do comedy. It felt like playing in a jazz band.
Growing up, I listened to a lot of jazz and blues records - John Coltrane and Etta James. I was also really into Radiohead and the BeeGees.
Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.
I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.
When I was in New York, I put together a show; I put together this really great band and performed at this place called Littlefield in Brooklyn. It was really fun. I did, like, 10 standards, and then I just hopped around different bars like Mona's and different jazz clubs in New York just singing because I know all the standards so well.
When I'm working, I'm pretty busy with that, but when I'm not, yeah, I like to make music. I sing in jazz bars and stuff, and then I mainly paint every day. It's kind of like a different side of my mind I like to use, and it keeps the other one fresh, and yeah, writing, I've been writing with some friends.
