Smooth Jazz Quotes

My other friends are in music relaxation class, which I do not attend, because smooth jazz makes me angry sometimes.

She was cool— the whole world seemed to spin around her in smooth jazz.

I've always thought you can judge the quality of a villain by his elevator music. Smooth jazz? Devious villainy with an inferiority complex. Pop hits? Ageing villainy trying desperately to be hip. Nero had chosen soft classical, as in the lobby. Oh, well played. this was self-assured villainy. Villainy that said I already own everything and have all the power. Relax. You're going to die in a minute, so you might as well enjoy this soothing string quartet.

And the City, in its own way, gets down for you, cooperates, smoothing its sidewalks, correcting its curbstones, offering you melons and green apples on the corner. Racks of yellow head scarves; strings of Egyptian beads. Kansas fried chicken and something with raisins call attention to an open window where the aroma seems to lurk. And if that's not enough, doors to speakeasies stand ajar and in that cool dark place a clarinet coughs and clears its throat waiting for the woman to decide on the key. She makes up her mind and as you pass by informs your back that she is daddy's little angel child. The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own.

If you asked what my favorite music is, I'd say the kind you'd hear while shopping for groceries on a Tuesday afternoon. That's just the kind of romantic I am. But when working around my ducks, I'm all business, like smooth jazz in a crowded elevator.

The Coma cluster is also what we call a “relaxed” system. Please resist the image of a group of galaxies kicking back and listening to smooth jazz.

When I point my fingers at the keys, the music springs straight out of me. Right hand playing notes sharp as tongues, telling stories while the smooth buttery rhythms back me up on the left.

Back in the eighties, the journalist Richard Rhodes nailed the place with just two words: Cupcake Land. To the irritation of local leaders, the nickname has stuck. Cupcake Land is a metropolis built entirely according to the developer's plan, without the interference of angry proles or ethnic pols as in nearby Kansas City. Cupcake Land encourages no culture but that which increases property values; supports no learning but that which burnishes the brand; hears no opinions but those that will further fatten the cupcake elite; tolerates no rebellion but that expressed in haircuts and piercings and alternative rock. You know what it's like even though you haven't been there. Smooth jazz. Hallmark cards. Applebees. Corporate Woods. (49)

Bud’s Jazz Records is there too. Just down the street, in the heart of Seattle’s Pioneer Square. It’s easy to miss but hard to forget. I popped in once to take some publicity photos. The owner simply asked, “Is this for good or for evil?” I said, “Good,” of course. “Good enough for me” was his smooth reply.

Back then he'd hammered out rags as rough as the planks that made up that schoolhouse stage. Over the years he's taken a saw and rasp to those tunes and smoothed them at the edges, sanded them slowly over time with finer and finer grit paper, and applied a polish to them. The songs are comfortable now. People can take their shoes off to dance without fear of a spike in the foot; they can lie back on that smooth and waxed wood to take a nap in the afternoon or make love all night long. Oliver sees himself as a carpenter, a craftsman putting notes and melodies together, fitting them when they will, stepping back to rest and reconsider when they won't.

He watched God flip through a few records before pulling one. He slid the vinyl out as carefully as Day would before placing it on the turntable. Soon Day’s room was filled with the soft sounds of George Howard’s Midnight Moods. It was a smooth, sexy jazz album; definitely one for making love to. Day’s

This new generation of Italian American entertainers shared Sinatra’s view of the new dance music that emerged in the 1950s. “Rock-and-roll is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear,” Sinatra told Congress in 1958. “Rock-and-roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd—in plain fact, dirty—lyrics … it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.” In response to the raw, driving sexuality of black-influenced rock, young Italian American men in New York and Philadelphia did to the new music what Sinatra and his generation had done to jazz. A style combining smooth vocal harmonies, romantic lyrics, and a stationary stage presence, doo-wop was invented in the 1940s by black youth on street corners, but it shot to the top of the pop charts in the late 1950s when Italian Americans adopted it as their own—just as most African American performers moved toward “soul music.” From 1958, when Dion (DiMucci) and the Belmonts placed several songs on the pop charts, until the “British Invasion” of 1964, Italian American doo-wop groups dominated American popular music. All wearing conservative suits and exuding a benign romanticism, the Capris, the Elegants, the Mystics, the Duprees, the Del-Satins, the Four Jays, the Essentials, Randy and the Rainbows, and Vito & the Salutations declared the arrival of Italians into American civilization. During the rise of doo-wop and Frank Rizzo, Malcolm X mocked the newly white Italians. “No Italian will ever jump up in my face and start putting bad mouth on me,” he said, “because I know his history. I tell him when you’re talking about me you’re talking about your pappy, your father. He knows his history. He knows how he got that color.” Though fewer and fewer Italian Americans know the history of which Malcolm X spoke, some have reenacted it.

I put on some smooth jazz and change into a smooth silk lungi.

Porter’s next new Hollywood work, MGM’s High Society (1956), was second-division Porter. It hit his characteristic points—the Latin rhythm number in “Mind If I Make Love To You,” the charm song full of syncopation and “wrong” notes in “You’re Sensational.” Porter even turned himself inside out in two numbers for Louis Armstrong, “High Society Calypso” (the Afro-Caribbean anticipation of reggae had just begun to trend in America) and, in duet with Bing Crosby, “Now You Has Jazz.” And the film’s hit, “True Love,” is a waltz so simple neither the vocal nor the chorus has any syncopation whatever. This is smooth Porter, the Tin Pan Alley Porter who wants everyone to like him, even the tourists. Everything about High Society is smooth—to a fault. Armstrong gives it flair, but everyone else is so relaxed he or she might be bantering between acts on a telethon. These are pale replicas of the characters so memorably portrayed in MGM’s first go at this material, The Philadelphia Story, especially by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. In their first moment, the two are in mid-fight; she breaks his golf clubs and he starts to take a swing at her, recalls himself to manly grace, and simply shoves her self-satisfied mug out of shot. This is not tough love. It’s real anger, and while Philip Barry, who wrote the Broadway Philadelphia Story, is remembered only as a boulevardier, he was in fact a deeply religious writer who interspersed romantic comedies with allegories on the human condition, much as Cole Porter moved between popular and elite composition. Underneath Barry’s Society folderol, provocative relationships undergo scrutiny as if in Christian parable; his characters are likable but worrisome—and, from First Couple Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly on down, there is nothing worrisome in this High Society.

Berlin wrote songs for a number of Astaire films of the period: Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, On the Avenue, Carefree. The two men became close personal friends for the rest of their lives. But the choice of Astaire as a Hollywood leading man is, at first glance, puzzling. Certainly, he was an extraordinary dancer, and songwriters appreciated his accuracy and clarity when singing their songs, even if his voice was reedy and thin. But a leading man? Essentially, Astaire epitomized what Berlin and other Jews strove to achieve. He was debonair, polished, sophisticated. His screen persona was that of a raffish, outspoken fellow, not obviously attractive, whose audacity and romanticism and wit in the end won out. It didn’t hurt that he could dance. But even his dance—so smooth and elegant—was done mostly to jazz. Unlike a Gene Kelly, who was athletic, handsome, and sexy, Astaire got by on style. Kelly was American whereas Astaire was continental. In short, Astaire was someone the immigrant might himself become. It was almost like Astaire was himself Jewish beneath the relaxed urbanity. In a film like Top Hat he is audacious, rude, clever, funny, and articulate, relying mostly on good intentions and charm to win over the girl—and the audience. He is the antithesis of a Clark Gable or a Gary Cooper; Astaire is all clever and chatty, balding, small, and thin. No rugged individualist he. And yet his romantic nature and persistence win all. Astaire only got on his knees to execute a dazzling dance move, never as an act of submission. His characters were largely wealthy, self-assured, and worldly. He danced with sophistication and class. In his famous pairings with Ginger Rogers, the primary dance numbers had the couple dressed to the nines, swirling on equally polished floors to the strains of deeply moving romantic ballads.

Berlin wrote songs for a number of Astaire films of the period: Top Hat, Follow the Fleet, On the Avenue, Carefree. The two men became close personal friends for the rest of their lives. But the choice of Astaire as a Hollywood leading man is, at first glance, puzzling. Certainly, he was an extraordinary dancer, and songwriters appreciated his accuracy and clarity when singing their songs, even if his voice was reedy and thin. But a leading man? Essentially, Astaire epitomized what Berlin and other Jews strove to achieve. He was debonair, polished, sophisticated. His screen persona was that of a raffish, outspoken fellow, not obviously attractive, whose audacity and romanticism and wit in the end won out. It didn’t hurt that he could dance. But even his dance—so smooth and elegant—was done mostly to jazz. Unlike a Gene Kelly, who was athletic, handsome, and sexy, Astaire got by on style. Kelly was American whereas Astaire was continental. In short, Astaire was someone the immigrant might himself become. It was almost like Astaire was himself Jewish beneath the relaxed urbanity. In a film like Top Hat he is audacious, rude, clever, funny, and articulate, relying mostly on good intentions and charm to win over the girl—and the audience. He is the antithesis of a Clark Gable or a Gary Cooper; Astaire is all clever and chatty, balding, small, and thin. No rugged individualist he. And yet his romantic nature and persistence win all.

Instead of a dial tone, smooth jazz greeted my ear. What the Horror?

Are you one of those people who thinks hip-hop belongs to Black people?” I ask. “Of course it does.” He smooths the humor from his expression. “We made it. It’s ours in the same way jazz and the blues and R&B are ours. We innovated, making sound where there was no sound before. The very roots of hip-hop are in West Africa from centuries ago. But we share our shit all the time, so you’re welcome.” I lift a brow at his ethno-arrogance, but he throws his head back laughing at me, maybe at himself. “Art, specifically music, is a living thing,” he says. “It isn’t just absorbed by the people who hear it, but it absorbs them. So, we shared hip-hop with the world, and it isn’t just ours anymore. The Beastie Boys heard it. Eminem heard it. Whoever heard it fell in love with it, added to it, and became a part of it.” “And that’s a good thing?” “Mostly. If that hadn’t happened, if we hadn’t shared it and someone other than us loved it, it’d still be niche. Underground. Now it’s global, but that wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t gone main- stream. Mainstream means more opportunities, so I’m all for white, Asian, Hispanic. We need everybody buying hip-hop, because ultimately, it’s about that green.

But this is what New Orleans has always done: take culture from its populations at the margins, smooth off the rough edges, and sell it to tourists around the globe. As with jazz, voodoo, and ghosts, so, too, with Katrina. Given the city’s history of selling trauma, will those killed in the wake of Katrina find themselves in the illustrious company of New Orleans’s famous ghosts?

We should be doing everything we can to enhance our surroundings to promote alpha waves, to promote relaxed, creative thought.  Take a nice warm bath, light some candles, play some smooth jazz.  Meditation is at the top of the list of things we can do to create alpha waves in our mind.  Even meditating for just for a few minutes can do the trick, and you can do that anytime, any place.

I felt I was New Age before it became hip (and now passé), and disliked the name given to this 'recent' wave of spiritual interest in the 1980s because the word 'new' was in it: this word automatically implies that the phase will soon pass into something either “established” or stale, or will be chronicled as an ephemeral fad or phase to be found on some old bookshelf one day. Again, passé. For instance, the New Thought movement faded with the smoke of the Great War, the war to end all wars – which later was reclassified as WWI. Indeed, just a few years into the new 21st century, New Age was becoming old. Smooth jazz seemed to replace the name in music, and holistic and integral were the latest catch words describing the eclectic philosophy of the past decades. Astrologers were laughing: they knew the planetary alignments that predicted this network of integrated thought; it was the same inspiration behind the world wide web. Uranus (technological innovations, groups) and Neptune (images, imagination) reunited in the mid 1990s in the practical sign of Capricorn; we all became more connected with the next jump in electronics, technology and vision, right on cue. The world wide wave (www) was here. That wave came in, peaked in the 1990s, everyone was refreshed and expanded (some got drenched), and the promoters were now looking for new packaging. By the end of the 1990s, the Dot.com bubble burst. It was time for the next phase.