Michael Segell > Quotes

“And where jazz music was concerned, there was a saying, Segodnia on igraet dzhaz, a zavtra rodinu prodast: Today you play jazz, tomorrow you betray the motherland.” Igor,”
― Michael Segell, The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool

“Later, there were several great white players, as there are today. But when it first matured, it was a black instrument. The saxophone was outside the system and the Negro was on the fringes of society. Together they found their voice.” Evoking”
― Michael Segell, The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool

“researchers have conducted more than a hundred studies that explore music’s ability to evoke in the listener the five “basic” emotions—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and love/tenderness, which appear in musical scores as, respectively, festoso, dolente, furioso, timoroso, and teneramente—or the hundreds of subsets of those emotions.”
― Michael Segell, The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool

“They were the younger guys playing at the end of the Swing Era, just playing their version of it. It became known as bebop, which sounds esoteric, but it was really just an offshoot of swing music.” That offshoot, however, almost instantly changed jazz music’s identity, advancing it from a danceable idiom played with the audience’s casual listening pleasure in mind to a more personal and cerebral modern music.”
― Michael Segell, The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool