Great Jazz Quotes

#1. I'm a great jazz fan.

Vidal Sassoon

#2. It just so happens that my oldest and best friend is Bob James, the Grammy-winning great jazz pianist!

Jack O'Brien

#3. There are no great jazz-fusion bands.

Prince

#4. I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.

Sonny Rollins

#5. During our first meeting, Tony Iommi was a great jazz guitarist, his capabilities cover all styles - Black Sabbath has even narrowed his horizons.

Geezer Butler

#6. Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn't mean that artists from the rock n' roll/folk-roots culture - of which he was not really a part - shouldn't get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists.

Bonnie Raitt

#7. A lot of the people that I photograph are master musicians themselves, whether they're singers or great jazz players and it's kind of fun to figure out who they came up with and who they emulated or who they idolized actually.

Carol Friedman

#8. Life is like a great jazz riff. You sense the end the very moment you were wanting it to go on forever.

Sheila Ballantyne

#9. The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

Maynard Ferguson

#10. If you're making money people don't think you're playing Jazz. When you're not making money they think you're a great Jazz musician.

Pete Fountain

#11. What separates great jazz musicians from average ones is Taste. Those who have taste consistently choose notes, tempos, timbres and voicings that seduce and satisfy attentive listeners.

Marc Myers

#12. I haven't a great jazz band, and I don't want one.

Glenn Miller

#13. I mix everything up. A museum curator once said to me that there is a great jazz component to the way I do things because good jazz is improvisation and draws elements from all different cultures. And that's the way I do everything - the way I dress and decorate.

Iris Apfel

#14. The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.

Bruce Springsteen

#15. What I like is not a particular genre, it's storytelling. There's a lot of great storytelling in jazz, and in folk and in country music ...

Lizz Wright

#16. Lizzy Parks. Check this out, this is brilliantShe is a fantastic jazz singer definitely one to watch from now on, she's got a great voice and she's a great songwriter as well

Jamie Cullum

#17. My great inspiration has always been Studs Terkel, who is a wonderful American oral historian. He was a radio DJ at first, interviewed a lot of jazz musicians, and at some point started to interview Americans about work.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#18. We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.

Wynton Marsalis

#19. I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

Sonny Rollins

#20. It's great to know that our old stuff still sounds good to our fans, just as it's wonderful to think that we've turned a few people on to jazz over the years.

Donald Fagen

#21. The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it's quite palpable but not visible. It's always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity.

Wynton Marsalis

#22. I don't regard myself as a great classical or jazz pianist. I like country music, but I'm not a great player. I just like music. Drums 'n' bass is pretty exciting and I'd love to explore it.

Keith Emerson

#23. In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

Michael Parkinson

#24. My favorite type of music to sing to would be rock and roll, Tenacious D, Led Zeppelin, some Queen - I love all of them. I love singing to them because they're all just great voices. I love listening to very obscure jazz.

Casey Abrams

#25. Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.

Ikue Mori

#26. I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day.

Bryan Ferry

#27. I have a huge record and cd collection of all kinds of great classical, jazz and all music but I find the internet very accessible and quick.

Aaron Zigman

#28. But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there's a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that's possible with the instrument.

Gary Burton

#29. As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott.

Laura Lippman

#30. It's almost worse because you think that you're mature and classic when you're in the newsie cap jazz phase. It's not a great look, a young person trying to seem old and mature and cultured. That's a summarily not-cool look.

Nick Kroll

#31. Grace Kelly plays with intelligence, wit and feeling. She has a great amount of natural ability and the ability to adapt. That is the hallmark of a first-class jazz musician.

Wynton Marsalis

#32. My own Brubeck Institute in California is turning out fantastic young jazz players, and I know great things will happen.

Dave Brubeck

#33. It's much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn't listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, '67.

David Bowie

#34. Frankie Randall is a consummate performer. He is an exquisite jazz pianist and wonderful singer. I had the great pleasure to work with him on the Dean Martin Show and I'm very proud to call him a friend!

Lainie Kazan

#35. I love Ray Charles. He can still teach everybody a lot about how to make great music. Not necessarily how to make hits, but how to make great music. Of course, part of it is his incredible talent. Who are the greatest jazz singers in the world? Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Ray Charles.

Ahmet Ertegun

#36. I don't think theater is dying, and musicals are a great American art form. We've got apple pie, jazz and musical theater.

Laura Benanti

#37. In fact, jazz has such a great feeling and great emotional content that it really doesn't require you to have technical understanding of it. I think you just have to allow your feelings to go with the music and you will find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

Dave Holland

#38. So, you know, there are a lot of the biggest records of the year. There's great music in hip-hop and jazz and, you know, and folk music.

Stephen W. Thompson

#39. From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South's great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll, as well as the Caribbean-inspired foodways today enshrined in Southern-style barbeque joints from Miami to Anchorage.

Colin Woodard

#40. 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

#41. I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.

Lynn Swann

#42. As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

Edgar Winter

#43. When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.

Flea

#44. I was really learning my craft as a jazz singer and working with some great players and all, really growing and feeling my wings.

Al Jarreau

#45. The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Ken Burns

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Great. I get to meet Jack Eversea, the Jack Eversea, and I act like a complete imbecile. It was so good Jazz wasn't here, she would have clobbered me by now. For that matter, she would have clobbered him and dragged him back to her lair.

Natasha Boyd

#51. People think it is all about country music, and I know a lot of country music has come out of there, but like Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dillon was recorded there. A lot of great records; R&B records, jazz records. It's a lot of great players and great studios.

Elvis Costello

#52. Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two great American institutions.

Henry Rollins

#53. We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Patti Smith

#54. I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.

Hugh Hefner

#55. I spent five years, at least, working with Miles. Together, we recorded ESP, Nefertiti, Sorcerer
and I can tell you; each of these albums instantly became jazz classics. Hey, we had Wayne Shorter playing tenor sax, Ron [Carter] on bass, Tony Williams played drums. That was great band we had.

Herbie Hancock

#56. I can turn on some jazz guitarist, and he won't do a thing for me, if he's not playing electrically. But Jeff Beck's great to listen to.

Ritchie Blackmore

#57. Shoes are a big part of your look. I think that if your outfit isn't really something special, then fun footwear is a great way to jazz it up and make your ensemble more interesting.

Christian Siriano

#58. Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

Marc Ribot

#59. In my teenage years I was as addicted to great pop as I was to free jazz, electronic music, and hardcore blues.

Scott Walker

#60. I studied the lives of jazz singers who would tour Europe, and ... what I learned was life was big ride for them. They'd seen the dark side of humanity ... but touring the world playing jazz, it was a truly carefree way of living. A great escapism, if you like.

Gary Carr

#61. 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

#62. Somerset desperately needs more high-end music making on its doorstep, so the chance to share great music spanning genres as diverse as orchestral classics, trip hop and jazz, in the utterly relaxed and cathartic environment of a Somerset field, is for me the fulfilment of a long-term dream.

Charles Hazlewood

#63. I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they'll become a great musician.

Charlie Haden

#64. I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.

Harvey Pekar

#65. Clint Eastwood said, the only things America has contributed to civilization are the western and jazz. And I don't think westerns are bad, but lots of people make great cinema. But jazz is right there.

Robert Wyatt

#66. Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.

Rachel Bloom

#67. Well I went to New Orleans to cover the jazz festival for Trio, it's this new arts channel, it's really great.

Amy Sedaris

#68. Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

Ahmad Jamal

#69. Well first of all, I'm a singer. I sing since I talk. So the great ballad singers, the people that sang with so much feeling, jazz, blues, all those singers, they were songs that I listened to, records that my mom played for me, and then later I bought.

Gloria Estefan

#70. Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Cab Calloway

#71. The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz ... you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.

Keith Jarrett

#72. I love jazz and pop rock and country. I grew up listening to Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Def Leppard, AC/DC, Anne Murray - if I hear something really great ... I want to be a part of it.

Natalie MacMaster

#73. I have this theory that I hold on to, the theory that everything great in art and in life in general is jazz. It's just like all these things that just kind of seem to fall into place. You know, like mistakes that somehow turn into something beautiful.

Jerrod Carmichael

#74. The numerous ecstatic traditions - including free jazz and funk - have all been great inspirations.

David First

#75. There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.

Sonny Rollins