Top 88 Best Jazz Quotes
#1. My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.
Walter Becker
#2. The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much.
Don DeLillo
#3. Life is a lot like jazz - it's best when you improvise.
George Gershwin
#4. Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.
Miller Williams
#5. The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Aberjhani
#6. I lie around the floor with my cats Billy and Jazz or watch DVDs with my best friends.
Cathy Freeman
#7. When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.
Carla Bley
#8. Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night.
Miles Kington
#9. My nerves did a jitter dance, stuck between two wolves.
Jazz Feylynn
#10. I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.
Bela Fleck
#11. I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
Tom Waits
#12. Tone on jazz guitars is a real tough issue.
Mark White
#13. But, I tell myself, Weight is just an artifact of gravity. If this were a jazz club on the moon, I would weigh less.
Weike Wang
#14. I stayed with them for about a year up there and, at night, worked over in Long Island at a club called The High Hat Club which was like a pseudo jazz / blues place.
William Bell
#15. I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.
Gary Lucas
#16. Jazz voices that unvanquishable, natural will toward creaativity and self-expression, depite everything, in the here and now.
Stephanie Mills
#17. I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.
Brian Eno
#19. And jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in
Julio Cortazar
#20. I do find modern jazz quite tricky.
Jane Asher
#21. I'm very influenced by jazz drummers. I always liked drummers like Roger Taylor, Keith Moon, Ian Paice, John Densmore. I just learned from playing to those drummers.
Steven Adler
#22. Since my father is a musician as well, he taught me growing up that if you can play jazz, you can learn all instruments and write on them. He wanted me to be a songwriter that can do anything in any genre. I'm all about doing every genre.
Meghan Trainor
#23. You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.
Adam Mansbach
#24. I think when I feel I'm at my best is when I'm on stage, and it's my version of jazz because it's just riffing or something.
Billy Crystal
#25. And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.
Travis Barker
#26. Intimate singing had a wonderful style in the '30s and '40s. It came out of Broadway and the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday. But Sinatra created the best romantic era that we've ever had.
Tony Bennett
#27. American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.
Ben Dreyfuss
#28. I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.
Carla Bley
#29. The No. 1 best-selling Christmas album of all time is from Kenneth Bruce Gorelick, the Jewish smooth-jazz legend Kenny G. American Jews have always produced a lot of holiday music, just not Hanukkah music.
Matisyahu
#30. I'd been a wedding singer through college, but after a few years of doing my best renditions of jazz standards to clinking glasses and the sound of forks on salad, I thought, 'Oh God, if this is all I do, I'll never be able to live with myself.'
Idina Menzel
#31. Every dance you make belongs to you. It is part of your collection. When you think of it like that, you'll want to make your next routine the best you've ever made!
Torron-Lee Dewar
#32. I prefer music where melody, harmony and rhythm come together and no one element overshadows the other. Jazz at its best is a democracy of creativity.
Jimmy Heath
#33. Sometimes when I run, I listen to jazz, but usually it's rock, since its beat is the best accompaniment to the rhythm of running.
Haruki Murakami
#34. When I was 12, I was doing competitive jazz, tap and ballet in Michigan. The studio put the best dancers together, and I joined that. We always did really, really well in local competitions.
Jillian Rose Reed
#35. When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside - jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We
Denis Johnson
#36. [David] Bowie went on to make best-selling music - funk, dance music, electronic music, while also being influenced by cabaret and jazz.
David Bowie
#37. The best gift I was ever given was the arts. My mum gave me those on a silver platter. Growing up, her and my grandmother would take me to ballets, classical concerts, even smoky jazz clubs I wasn't supposed to be in!
Jill Scott
#38. I have a difficult relationship with jazz. My parents really love it, and I went to a school where jazz was considered the best thing ever, so I had to leave it be for a long time. But now I'm rediscovering it. I'm approaching jazz in a different way.
Agnes Obel
#39. I have been influenced by the greatest artists in jazz, pop, reggae, traditional, ballards, pop, and all types of music, taking the best from each to represent my own personality. Whitney Houston, George Michaels, Sade, Phil Collins, and many others have influenced me.
Laura Pausini
#40. Well, I had started a program which is even longer running than this one in 1967 which was a jazz program called The Best of Jazz and that still goes out on Monday nights. That's been going for 33 years or something.
Humphrey Lyttelton
#41. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.
Kurt Vonnegut
#42. Trombone virtuoso and innovative composer, Papo combines the best of jazz and Latin music to create a genre that is unique and wild. He's redefined Latin jazz!
Michael Brecker
#43. The cool thing is that jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit. Because in jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best, we're non-judgmental.
Herbie Hancock
#44. [On Lisa Kudrow:] She's like the best kind of jazz there is. You don't know what note she's going to hit and it's always a surprise.
Meg Ryan
#45. Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.
George Gershwin
#46. I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic ... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.
Joe Carnahan
#47. Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.
Duke Ellington
#48. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.
Sonny Rollins
#49. I have two main bass guitars, and my main bass is a four-string 1964 Fender Jazz, and I've named it Justine.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner
#50. There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.
Robert Wyatt
#51. Comedy is the ultimate truth. Jazz is hitting the notes that that no one else would hit, and comedy is saying words that no one else would say.
Tommy Chong
#52. Anyone who understands Jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's what's so simple about it.
Yogi Berra
#53. As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.
Stan Getz
#54. I always wanted praise, and I always wanted attention; I won't lie to you. I was a jazz critic, and that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them. So I thought, 'What could I do? I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act or anything like that. OK, I can write.'
Harvey Pekar
#55. Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.
Donald Miller
#56. Many jazz artists go to L.A. seeking a more comfortable life and then they really stop playing.
Sonny Rollins
#57. My style is a little quirky. I can't play as fast as most professional jazz players.
Donald Fagen
#58. In Montreal, there is a friend of mine at school who is a jazz pianist with an amazing voice, and we sort of have this fusion/soul/R&B/folk music kind of thing. We've been keeping it low-key and opening for some friends.
Jake Epstein
#59. The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.
Paul Weller
#60. Even though I left for a year, I grew here as a Jazz man. If I'm fortunate enough to go into the Hall of Fame, I will go as a Jazz man.
Karl Malone
#61. The first thing is, jazz is one of the few things to let you know that there is a God and there is a creation.
Billy Higgins
#62. I've been a massive obsessive about jazz singers all my life.
Eddi Reader
#63. I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.
Herbie Hancock
#64. I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.
Sonny Rollins
#65. This assignment could damn well project all the words across my face and the ink stain my hands a gory mess before I finished it.
Jazz Feylynn
#66. It just so happens that my oldest and best friend is Bob James, the Grammy-winning great jazz pianist!
Jack O'Brien
#67. I did listen to 1920s jazz or Al Johnson and a lot of early singers coming out of England. I would branch out a little bit to get a sense of the world that he might be coming into, in the '30s when jazz was changing.
Ed Speleers
#68. I took the frets out of my bass after I was getting into jazz a lot and I wanted to have that upright sound.
Jaco Pastorius
#69. In 1994, I started touring again and I recorded two albums for Chesky Jazz.
Chuck Mangione
#70. The difference between blues, jazz, rock n' roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It's scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.
Russell Simmons
#71. The age of 18 seemed the right time to try something different in my life. Moving to the U.K. was a risk, and I was never confident that I could ever make a full-time living being a musician, but I had to try. Initially, I worked as a jazz musician in pubs or with bands.
Manfred Mann
#72. I have believed for many years that Oscar Peterson is not only the greatest pianist in jazz today, but the greatest it has ever known.
Gene Lees
#73. If the average jazz artist uses his head and at the outset of his career realizes he won't play as well at fifty as he does at twenty-five, he won't be in a line-up outside the Salvation Army when he's fifty.
Oscar Peterson
#74. We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.
David Amram
#75. I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.
Herbie Hancock
#76. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo
#77. As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.
Jim Coleman
#78. I was taking chemical engineering. But I went into the army after that. When I came out of the army, I was a different person. I met a lot of good jazz players in the army.
Mose Allison
#79. My father is a jazz musician, so I grew up hearing jazz. My parents loved it, but I didn't like it. It went on for too long. Yes, I had certain teachers that really inspired me, like Danny Barker, and John Longo. And I had no idea that I would have any impact on jazz.
Wynton Marsalis
#80. I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world.
David Sanborn
#81. Regarding jam sessions: Jazz musicians are the only workers I can think of who are willing to put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.
George Carlin
#82. Jazz vampires,' said Stephanopoulos.
'I wish I hadn't started calling them that,' I said.
Ben Aaronovitch
#83. I think the challenges for me was to go into the studio with these incredible jazz players and come up to their level of excellence. That's always a challenge.
Rita Coolidge
#84. My genre of music is very eclectic. I might play some Latin jazz, or just go into a spontaneous jazz thing. That's the thing about coming to one of my performances. Not every show is the same.
Sheila E.
#85. There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.
Pat Metheny
#86. Trouble follows me wherever I go. Thing I'm in is just a sack o'woe.
Jon Hendricks
#87. I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.
Norman Granz
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