Top 100 Jazz Is Quotes
#1. It just so happens that my oldest and best friend is Bob James, the Grammy-winning great jazz pianist!
Jack O'Brien
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.
Duke Ellington
#8. My style is a little quirky. I can't play as fast as most professional jazz players.
Donald Fagen
#9. Trouble follows me wherever I go. Thing I'm in is just a sack o'woe.
Jon Hendricks
#10. 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.
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#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
#18. 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
#19. Tone on jazz guitars is a real tough issue.
Mark White
#20. 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
#21. Science teachers and the mentally ill, that's all Jazz is for.
Noel Fielding
#22. One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
Herbie Hancock
#23. I don't know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.
Norman Granz
#24. Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?
John Lurie
#25. My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.
Damien Chazelle
#27. Jazz is an art that takes decades to appreciate and understand.
Jake Shimabukuro
#28. [Jazz singing] is like pornography. You can't say what it is, but you know it when you see it.
Kurt Elling
#29. 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
#30. Jazz exemplifies artistic activity that is at once individual and communal, performance that is both repetitive and innovative, each participant sometimes providing background support and sometimes flying free.
Mary Catherine Bateson
#31. Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence ...
Pat Metheny
#32. To me, 'Blue Like Jazz' is a quintessential American story. So many people are just like Don - raised Christian and go off to college only to abandon their beliefs in order to fit in or be accepted.
Marshall Allman
#33. 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
#34. Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat.
Chuck Wendig
#35. Both the nationalists and the communists disapproved of jazz and feared it. They thought it would weaken people's resolve to fight off the invasion. And most Americans know, China did ban all Western music for about 30 years, starting in 1949. This is where it started.
Nicole Mones
#36. Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.
Kamasi Washington
#37. It is Jazz's very nature to change, to develop & adapt to the circumstances of its environment.
Pat Metheny
#38. ...teaching is like playing jazz. Even if you perform the same number over and over, it never comes out the same twice, and you don't know exactly how it will sound until you hear it. Teaching is like writing with your voice
Earl R. Babbie
#39. Bruges is a beautiful medieval city almost untouched by time. If you like jazz, you will be well catered for. If you like chocolate and beer, you will be in heaven.
James Frain
#40. It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.
Damien Chazelle
#41. But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.
Romare Bearden
#43. Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
Ken Burns
#44. Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.
Kenny G
#46. What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.
Branford Marsalis
#47. What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.
Maxim Gorky
#48. What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!
Pete La Roca
#49. But I don't have anything to prove. My reputation is what it is. It seems that a lot of gay men are put off by jazz because either they don't believe it speaks to their own experience or they believe the genre itself to be somehow intolerant of homosexuality.
Fred Hersch
#50. The public, hearing pop music, is, without knowing it, also soaking up jazz.
Norman Granz
#51. What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don't think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact.
Sonny Rollins
#52. What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.
John Lurie
#53. Lately, my mind is like an orchestra. If you don't have the conductor, you don't know what to do. One guy is playing jazz, one guy is playing rock and roll, another classical. It's a big mess.
Goran Ivanisevic
#54. You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?
Charlie Watts
#55. Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.
Horace Silver
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
Allen Ginsberg
#60. 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
#61. The philosophy of jazz represents tolerance, teamwork and inclusion. That's what America is about. The music reflects that.
T. S. Monk
#62. The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
Ben Okri
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I always think of a voice as an instrument, whether a voice is a trumpet, or violin, or bass. You know what I mean? A horn or wind instrument versus a string instrument. Horn instruments are definitely more toward jazz.
Debbie Harry
#66. Marijuana is taken by musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type ...
Harry J. Anslinger
#67. Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.
Wynton Marsalis
#68. I think jazz is a wonderful learning tool.
John Otto
#69. Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
Theodor W. Adorno
#70. Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.
Nigel Kennedy
#71. Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.
Ralph Ellison
#72. Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.
Steve Lacy
#73. A spiritual journey is becoming what one has always meant to be-come and always was. One with God's Spirit.
Jazz Feylynn
#74. Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
Charlie Parker
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Martin Williams persistently gets at essences, and that is why he has contributed so much to the very small body of authentic jazz criticism.
Nat Hentoff
#78. Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.
Pat Martino
#79. I think that's what I love about jazz is that you can do what you want, and you're allowed to mess up.
Rebecca Ferguson
#80. Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.
Miles Davis
#81. I wish I didn't want the exotic man who knows the entire history of jazz, and instead wanted the teacher, who has his flaws but whose kindness is as rare as genius.
Merritt Tierce
#82. Acting is like music and you improvise. It's like jazz, there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's not a plan. You practice to music and you just play it.
Denzel Washington
#83. This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.
Wynton Marsalis
#84. If you have to ask what jazz is you will never know. Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
#85. What is my definition of jazz? 'Safe sex of the highest order.
Kurt Vonnegut
#86. The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
#87. 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.
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili.
Harry James
#91. There's this certain caliber of dancing I was striving for when I was younger, and it's very hard for me to go back and just do it for fun. But I take all other kinds of classes: I take jazz classes, modern classes, and I love doing that instead of going to the gym. The gym is not very much fun.
Summer Glau
#93. If I knew what it was going to look like, I wouldnt be so excited to be a part of it. Jazz is a music of surprise; its a music of spontaneity. I think jazz musicians live
I know I do
for being surprised and not knowing whats going to come next.
Joshua Redman
#94. The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.
Ken Burns
#95. We're working as if it were going out of style-which of course it is.
Paul Desmond
#96. This is jazz, this is funk, this is soul, this is gospel
This is sanctified sick, this is player Pentecostal.
This is church front pew, Amen, pulpit,
What my people need and the opposite of bullshit.
Killer Mike
#97. 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
#99. Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.
Al Jarreau
#100. If Music is a Place
then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.
Vera Nazarian
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