Stuart Davis, Swing Landscape, 1938

Narrator: Davis addressed jazz in this 1957 interview. 

Stuart Davis: Jazz music has always been very important to me, from the time I was a little boy. As soon as I was old enough to go around to places where they played it, which to put it briefly was saloons, and more specifically negro saloons, well I went there. To listen. For no other reason except that I liked it. And this enthusiasm and response for jazz has continued without interruption to the present day. 

And in regard to its effect on my painting, I would say that it’s been a continuous source of inspiration in my work, from the very beginning. For the simple reason that I regard it as the one American art, up until now, which seemed to me to have the same quality of art without ulterior motive that I found in modern European painting. And I always quite naturally equated the two as a source of real art. Even though the conditions under which it is made and the purpose for which it is used, I mean jazz, are very different from that of painting.