Top 100 Jazz Is Quotes
#1. 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
#2. jazz is punk for old people. I guess that explains it, because I don't like punk, either.
Gayle Forman
#3. Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.
Dave Brubeck
#4. [Jazz] is a music of freedom and wonder. It's our indigenous art form, and I'm still blessed to travel around the world and people lay out the carpet for us, so it's quite touching.
Charles Lloyd
#5. Jazz is not a game of chance. Its sonorous disorder is only an appearance. It is an organized force obeying obscure laws, conforming to a secret technique, codified or not, and we discover that no one can become a virtuoso on the spur of the moment in this orchestra of 'noisemakers.
Wanda Landowska
#6. The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.
Pat Metheny
#7. Jazz is more than music, it's a state of mind. Hot, cool or in between; we take those outward expressions and transpose them into our inner-most thoughts. We let our instruments do our bidding.
J.A. Rollins
#9. Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.
Pat Metheny
#10. Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.
Sid Caesar
#11. I know jazz is completely un-American. But the reason why America doesn't like it is because it's not funny. We [americans] have made jazz funny.
Paul Provenza
#12. You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.
Louis Armstrong
#13. Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.
Tony Wilson
#14. Make no mistake, this music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen to your Snoop Doggy Dog, Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, but add a little Ellington, Basie and Coltrane to your life as well.
Christian McBride
#15. The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.
Van Morrison
#17. Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.
Steve Lacy
#18. It's something that - jazz is one of the few things that you can go and listen to, I don't care where you're from, what you are, what background you come from - there's something there for you.
Billy Higgins
#19. It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing.
Pat Metheny
#21. We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?
Ken Burns
#24. Jazz has the power to make men forget their differences and come together ... Jazz is the personification of transforming overwhelmingly negative circumstances into freedom, friendship, hope, and dignity.
Quincy Jones
#25. Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that it's almost as if it's intertwined with society.
Tom Harrell
#26. Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.
Wynton Marsalis
#27. It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.
Rita Coolidge
#28. When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.
Robert Glasper
#29. 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
#30. Jazz is a music that really allows a person to express his deepest self, his most personal self - Africa being the primary source of jazz. Naturally, improvisation and swing are a part of jazz, improvisation being the key.
Harold Land
#31. Jazz is the music of the body.
Anais Nin
#32. Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.
Sayyid Qutb
#33. Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.
Toots Thielemans
#35. To me, jazz is a place where anything is possible.
Bill Frisell
#36. I love music, and a lot of it. Jazz is probably on the top with guys like Miles Davis. But I even enjoy music from the '60s and '70s.
Donovan Bailey
#37. Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.
John Corigliano
#38. People like Art Blakey and Buddy Rich, you look at them playing music, and it's just like looking at a heavy metal drummer. I mean, they're playing with the same amount of ferocity. It's not to say all jazz is like that.
Damien Chazelle
#39. Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.
Sonny Rollins
#40. Man, if you have to ask what it [jazz] is, you'll never know.
Louis Armstrong
#41. Jazz is not the format where I want to stay, but it really is a starting point for me.
Justin Guarini
#42. Jazz is not gonna be a dinosaur and stay around in one form.
McCoy Tyner
#43. Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
Wynton Marsalis
#44. Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.
Ray Brown
#46. Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.
Mary Lou Williams
#47. Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.
Johnny Griffin
#48. The chief trouble with jazz is that there is not enough of it; some of it we have to listen to twice.
Don Herold
#50. I think I represent a more left-wing view of what jazz is.
Pat Metheny
#52. Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
Nina Simone
#53. I think jazz is good, but I don't enjoy it. It's not for me.
Ted Rall
#54. To me, jazz is the closest thing to insanity that there is in music.
David
#55. One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.
Herbie Hancock
#56. I don't like heroin, unless you're a jazz musician and then you have to be on it because jazz is the sound of heroin.
John Waters
#57. What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.
Damien Chazelle
#58. Not long after we started working for him I asked Bernard if he thought Thatcher was evil,'I said. 'He said it was like asking what jazz is.
Jack Womack
#59. Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all. So, I'm not really a fan of Free music. Having said that, Jazz is based on individual expression and I'm compelled to respect the Free player's option to express himself as he chooses.
Pete La Roca
#60. Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.
Keith Jarrett
#61. Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.
Nat Wolff
#62. Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
Dave Brubeck
#63. The reason why the music [jazz] is important is because it's an art form-an ancient art form-that takes in the mythology of our people.
Wynton Marsalis
#64. Jazz is a big thing with me. It's a very big passion of mine, to play it. I'm an amateur musician and I love everything about it. I was obsessed with jazz when I was 15 years old and I know a lot about it because I've loved it so much.
Woody Allen
#65. Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!
Christian Scott
#66. Amsterdam must have more than a million people. But the only area where jazz is really profitable and successful in an economic sense is in Japan. That's because they haven't been exposed enough.
Norman Granz
#68. Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.
Sonny Rollins
#69. Jazz isn't like pop, where you sell millions of records with a hit. Your spirit and soul aren't important in pop music. But jazz is like classical music. If people like you, they'll remember you and you'll last forever.
Freddie Hubbard
#70. Hell, nobody knows where jazz is going to go. There may be a kid right now in Chitlin Switch, Georgia, who is going to come along and upset everybody.
Quincy Jones
#72. Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.
Nat Wolff
#73. Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.
Percy Heath
#75. Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.
Robert Glasper
#76. When jazz is played in another nation, it is called American. When it is played in another country, it sounds false. Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.
George Gershwin
#77. I think jazz is a phenomenal creative force, because it's one man, one vote as you're playing, but it's a collective thing, what you're doing. You're listening to all the musicians around you and you're working within that structure.
Herb Alpert
#78. Jazz is not a 'form' but a collection of tags and tricks.
Ernest Newman
#79. I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.
Jon Huntsman Jr.
#80. There is a view that jazz is 'evil' because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work. They knew how to punch through music that would cure and make people feel good.
Garth Hudson
#82. Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise ... but a way of life.
Lester Bowie
#83. Jazz is more raw than punk in a lot of ways. It's so expressive. A lot of people say to me, especially older people, 'It took me ages to get into jazz.'
King Krule
#85. The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.
Pat Metheny
#86. Jazz is improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with earthy elegance, nuance and subtlety, with the integrity of individual expression within (usually) a group context, with true democracy in action.
Greg Thomas
#87. Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.
Pat Martino
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. If you have to ask what jazz is you will never know. Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
#91. 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
#92. 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
#94. 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
#95. If Music is a Place
then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.
Vera Nazarian
#96. Reading to kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string quartet.
Sean Wilentz
#97. The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas ... and that negotiation is the art
Wynton Marsalis
#98. One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.
Mahalia Jackson
#99. If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is.
Clint Eastwood
#100. I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people.
Terry Teachout
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