Jazz Artist Quotes

#1. 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

#2. I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

Nat King Cole

#3. I'm not a jazz artist. Don't get me wrong now, it's all music to me. I just played music and if it's likeable, someone liked the sound, then fine, but I'm not interested in being a jazz musician. I don't consider myself a jazz musician. I don't have anything to do with that word.

Pharoah Sanders

#4. I'm always looking for ways to develop as an artist, especially as a jazz artist-to find different ways of testing my voice.

Cassandra Wilson

#5. The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

Miles Davis

#6. 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

#7. As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n' roll and jazz standards.

Idina Menzel

#8. I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It's either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there's always a buzzing beneath you.

Chadwick Boseman

#9. 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

#10. I work with many jazz artists as Miles Davis, Laughlin, etc.. One of the things all these artists had in common is that they had no fear.

George Duke

#11. Me as an artist, I've ventured off into doing all types of music. I'll do a jazz album, you know what I mean.

Common

#12. A wonderful story collection set between one place and another and shaped by a fearless sense of comedy.

W.G. Sebald

#13. Fear is a huge thing for older people.

James Hillman

#14. If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Buddy Rich

#15. If you're a young artist, wondering what to call yourself, consider 'multimedia artist.' It's so vague. Then, no one can say, 'Hey, how come you're a jazz person, and you're making a pop opera?

Laurie Anderson

#16. It takes a whole lot of medicine for me to pretend I am somebody else.

Randy Newman

#17. I don't know how many calories an average chess player burns per game, but it often exceeds that of a player in ball games. It is not only the chess as such: You need to be fit and undergo complicated preparation.

Viswanathan Anand

#18. A cat only has itself.

V.S. Naipaul

#19. Angelo is a brilliant jazz talent. His receptivity, seriousness, his ability to execute ideas simple or complex, combined with his love and feel for the substance of jazz reveal why he is an exceptional artist.

Mulgrew Miller

#20. I've always felt that most jazz artists don't need producers .. most jazz artists know what kind of sound they want. They don't need a producer to come in there and tell them, "Oh, I think you should do this." I've always found it very strange that there's been such a thing as producers in jazz.

Christian McBride

#21. A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.

Steve Lacy

#22. Life was so simple for a dog. Eat. Walk. Dump. Nap. Eat. Dump. Sleep. And then do it all over again the next day. There was beauty in simplicity.

Susan C. Daffron

#23. Footballers can be like artists when the mind and body are working as one. It is what Miles Davis does when he plays free jazz - everything pulls together into one intense moment that is beautiful.

Lilian Thuram

#24. I was interested in the ways that artists responded to totalitarianism - the Czech Jazz Section, Romanian absurdist theatre, Brecht's alienation effect. The anything-goes, anarchic qualities of jazz and Surrealism seemed to offer a way to cross some of the forbidden frontiers of Eastern Europe.

Nicholas Royle

#25. To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

Nina Simone

#26. If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician ...

Sheena Iyengar

#27. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

Studs Terkel

#28. I'm the slowest driver in the world.

Anthony Hopkins