Jazz has the power to make men forget their differences and come together... Jazz is the personification of transforming overwhelmingly negative circumstances into freedom, friendship, hope, and dignity.
Interpretation
Jazz unites people by transcending their differences, offering them freedom and hope through its expression.
Quincy Jones highlights the transformative power of jazz music, emphasizing how it has the ability to bring people together despite their differences. He suggests that through jazz, individuals can experience freedom and foster friendships, even in the face of negative circumstances, ultimately promoting dignity and hope.
In practice
In a speech about cultural events, you might say, 'As Quincy Jones said, jazz has the power to make men forget their differences and come together.'
Just blow in it and sound bad for about a year and then make it sound a little bit better, and you get a little band together, and then you get a few jobs. You take four guys that sound half bad, but if they're 25 percent each, they can give 100 percent, you know?
Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.
When you produce an album, you're dealing with it theatrically. It has to have a structure, and the inner response to that is that the ear loves it.
You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.
I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.
I tell my kids and I tell proteges, always have humility when you create and grace when you succeed, because it's not about you. You are a terminal for a higher power. As soon as you accept that, you can do it forever.
Will punk rock ever die? Pal, if you have to ask it's dead to you.
I was never too keen on the British music press. They've called us a supermarket hype, and they used to suggest that we didn't write our own songs.
It's America's classical music ... this becomes our tradition ... the bottom line of any country in the world is what did we contribute to the world? ... we contributed Louis Armstrong
The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band
It was all part of being a Beatle, really: just getting lugged around and thrust into rooms full of press men taking pictures and asking questions.
Rock n' roll means so much more to people; it enriches the culture. Also, it inspires people; there's no half-feeling. When I first got into it, I was inspired by people who had come before me, and I found myself in the position of handing that on.
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