Top 100 Jazz Blues Quotes
#1. My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something ... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.
Rokia Traore
#2. So from Jazz, Blues, R&B, Soul, Classical and Country music, Hip Hop has introduced us to a little bit of everything.
B.J. The Chicago Kid
#3. One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.
Steve Winwood
#4. What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.
Ray Charles
#5. I'm done with industrial. Seriously, my iPod collection at home has no industrial music on it; it's strictly jazz, blues and country.
Al Jourgensen
#6. 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
#7. I love most melodic music - classical, reggae, big band, jazz, blues, country, pop, swing, folk.
John Lescroart
#8. Whenever I'm in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here - like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things - but I couldn't do what they did. They were too good.
B.B. King
#9. 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
#10. T was in a blue mood , his open reflections on the isloation of his life floating like Jazz notes under a pink moon
Saira Viola
#11. I am not the blues, I am jazz. I want to be present in the moment, not wallow in it.
Christopher Moore
#12. My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.
Yael Naim
#14. I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I'm still and quiet inside, I'll begin. It's very personal; it has to be. One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece.
Bobby McFerrin
#15. I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.
Adrian Mitchell
#16. My dad actually taught me how to play piano. I was classically trained, but I've started to branch off a little bit into blues and jazz. That's my new thing.
Noah Gray-Cabey
#17. I love good rock'n'roll, blues and jazz, gospel, and a little reggae.
Jerry Hall
#18. I've gone the full spectrum - from gospel to blues to jazz to soul to pop - and the public has accepted what I've done through it all. I think it means I've been doing something right at the right time.
Lou Rawls
#19. The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.
Wynton Marsalis
#20. The jazz band's chief stimulus, of course, was the rise of the negro 'blues' and their exploitation by the negro song-writer, W. C. Handy.
Bix Beiderbecke
#21. The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.
Lucinda Williams
#22. Some musicians play blues, others classical jazz or bluegrass. I like to play political roles because I can merge my political interests with my creative interests.
Jeffrey Wright
#23. The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.
Buddy Guy
#24. Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.
Alexis Korner
#25. Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.
Willie Nelson
#26. I was in a rock band; I was my own folk singer; I was in a death metal band for a very short time; I was in a cover band, a jazz band, a blues band. I was in a gospel choir.
Kiesza
#27. Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.
Wynton Marsalis
#28. In blues, classical and jazz, you get more revered with age.
Bonnie Raitt
#29. The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.
Luther Allison
#30. I loved music from the age of eight. Jazz and blues. But also Little Richard and Elvis Presley.
Bryan Ferry
#31. What isn't on my iPod playlist? I have very eclectic tastes. Jazz. Classic Rock. Hip Hop. Ska. Soul. Electronica.World Music. Funk. Blues. Chamber Music. Reggaeton. Gospel. And a whole lot of Prince. (I am a Minnesota gal through and through.)
Michele Norris
#32. I believe that blues and jazz are the two uniquely American contributions into music.
Edgar Winter
#33. For me, jazz, R&B, jump swing, Chicago blues, country blues, early hillbilly music, and honky tonk all stem from the same source
Duke Robillard
#34. I never liked blues and I really didn't like jazz. I liked Chuck Berry.
Johnny Ramone
#35. You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.
Art Blakey
#36. People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.
Alan Lomax
#37. African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.
David Simon
#38. As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.
Edgar Winter
#39. I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.
Etta James
#40. 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
#41. Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.
Lady Gaga
#42. My style of singing is very much Latin jazz meets Latin and a little bit of rhythm and blues. When I do ballads, my fans love it. They want to listen to my classics. They want to party.
La India
#43. I forget what the official name of it was, but they did an all-day of roots music - every kind of music you can imagine from around the country - New Orleans Jazz to Indian flute players, R&B, you name it. I met and became good friends with (blues guitar player) Joe Louis Walker. He was on the show.
Scotty Moore
#44. 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
#45. I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.
Edgar Winter
#46. Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.
Etta James
#47. Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.
B.B. King
#48. And what happened was, it's the same thing an older, more successful writer of ficition might say to a student: write about what you know. And what I knew - of course I knew jazz, but I also knew country, blues and some rock and roll. And that came out.
Larry Coryell
#49. Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.
Christina Aguilera
#50. A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.
Albert Murray
#51. I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly 'Frankenstein' had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there's one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues.
Edgar Winter
#52. For me, the ultimate form of expression is blues, where jazz appeals to me on an intellectual level.
Scott Henderson
#53. I'm not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues.
Dinah Shore
#54. I do not claim any of the creation of the blues, although I have written many of them even before Mr. Handy had any blues published. I heard them when I was knee-high to a duck.
Jelly Roll Morton
#55. In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me.
Jelly Roll Morton
#56. My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period.
Tony Iommi
#58. Of course when you are a kid you listen to what your parents had around. A lot of gospel, jazz. Now when I started to listen to music on my own it was around the time of the birth of rock and roll. Shortly thereafter I started to get into more blues and more traditional rootsy American music.
Jorma Kaukonen
#59. Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread
without it, it's flat.
Carmen McRae
#60. All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.
Mose Allison
#61. Growing up, I listened to a lot of jazz and blues records - John Coltrane and Etta James. I was also really into Radiohead and the BeeGees.
Alex Clare
#63. I tended to lean towards the guys who both sang and played, such as Ricky Skaggs, Vince Gill, Steve Wariner ... And at the other end of the spectrum, I had Eric Clapton in a rock and blues sense, jazz guys such as Tal Farlow and Les Paul ... Then Chet Atkins-type stuff.
Brad Paisley
#64. Blues is like the roux in a gumbo. People ask me if jazz always has the blues in it. I say, if it sounds good it does.
Wynton Marsalis
#65. Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.
Edgar Meyer
#66. Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone to all of these.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#67. Rip Rig + Panic that I joined, they were really influenced by jazz and blues and punk. So I think what happened from punk, which was kind of DIY, was that it created a kind of creative place that was kind of without limits, in a way.
Neneh Cherry
#68. In order to play jazz, you have to be able to play the blues.
Robert Cray
#69. The blues and jazz will live forever ... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.
Jack Nicholson
#70. We hit every jazz and blues club on and off Bourbon Street, dancing and drinking until we girls were drunk enough to go with the boys to the strip clubs which outnumbered all other businesses in the French Quarter. Here is where my solution unfolded.
Darwun St. James
#71. I can show you that I have played with just about every jazz musician, every African musician, every blues musician. It's not like I'm cashing in on a false concept. This is what I do.
Carlos Santana
#72. My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.
Alvin Lee
#73. I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.
Alexis Korner
#74. I have truly eclectic taste in music, and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; world music, Brit-pop, classic rock, blues/jazz, even the odd bit of heavy metal.
Rachel Miner
#75. New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.
Tim Cahill
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about jazz and blues.
John Mayall
#79. The common root, of course, comes out of Africa. That's the pulse.The African pulse. It's all the way back from ... the old slave chants and up through the blues, the jazz, and up through rock. And it's all got the African pulse.
Duke Ellington
#80. The world I live in is benefiting from things like satellite radio. Jazz and blues fests are everywhere now, and Americana is going strong on college radio. What I'm hearing is an appreciation of real music.
Bonnie Raitt
#81. I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.
Ronnie Milsap
#82. Now listen for your song. Everybody's got a song. When I used to chase the Trane - John Coltrane that is - he used to tell me, 'If I know a man's sound, I know the man.' Do you hear the melody playing in your mind? Does it move you, nudge you off your seat?
David Mutti Clark
#83. I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.
Quincy Jones
#84. I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues.
David Johansen
#85. After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.
Robert Quine
#86. That's the kind of musical freedom I like: jazz, rock, blues, anything. You adopt different attitudes when you play different music.
Alvin Lee
#87. I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music.
Hamid Drake
#88. Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!
Miles Davis
#89. I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.
Ernest Gaines
#90. You hear lots of notes, don't you? Some have a major sound. Some have a minor sound. But there's not one blue note among all these black and white keys. The real blues, the soul of the sound, comes from the spaces in-between.
David Mutti Clark
#91. When I discovered Mose Allison I felt I had discovered the missing link between jazz and blues
Ray Davies
#92. It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.
Jim Sullivan
#93. I think if it wasn't for the blues, there wouldn't be no jazz.
T-Bone Walker
#94. If you're an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you've got to change. You've got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you've been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n' roll, blues, then do it.
Tobin Bell
#95. But in Shimabukuro's hands, as he breaks out experimental jazz, lays down a steady blues train, or shreds on rock anthems, this little jumping flea becomes a melodic monster.
Mother Jones
#96. When I'd hear something that sounded like I could follow it - most of those big band jazz tunes are blues anyway - I would hum it and play with the fiddle while I was humming.
Johnny Gimble
#97. I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.
John McLaughlin
#99. I learned jazz; that comes from blues. I learned rock; that comes from blues. I learned pop; that comes from blues. Even dance, that comes from blues, with the answer-and-response.
Cyndi Lauper
#100. In my teenage years I was as addicted to great pop as I was to free jazz, electronic music, and hardcore blues.
Scott Walker
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