Jazz
Ward is involved in the world of jazz and has collaborated with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. After the documentary Jazz, was aired on Public Television, in an interview in the New York Times, Ward spoke of playing West End Blues by Louis Armstrong, as a 15 year old student, so often that the bartender in the Paris cafe across the street from his student housing called him 'Satchmo:' "I must have played it a thousand times," he remembered. "I think jazz music is so important to this country. . . . . . I find these characters, Armstrong, Ellington, working in a Jim Crow world, genuinely heroic.""
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Famous quotes containing the word jazz:
“He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordinate grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, “Give me the co-ordinates.”... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!”
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“It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.”
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“The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.”
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