Top 81 Jazz Musician Sayings
#1. I'm not a jazz musician, because, I mean, firstly, I can't play anything. I'm not bad on the tamborine. I have a certain way with the triangle. But I'm not a jazz musician ... my band, they always joke, they always say that I'm a disposable, pop, jazz superstar.
Michael Buble
#2. Some people think I'm a rock 'n' roll musician and some think I'm a jazz musician but, for me, there is no difference.
Georgie Fame
#3. In classical music, love is based on bitin'
imitation. It's not based on interpretation. A jazz musician, if he plays someone else's song, has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.
Todd Boyd
#4. The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
Louis Armstrong
#5. The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.
Wynton Marsalis
#6. My short answer would be that there is no greatest jazz musician of the century. Jazz, like any valid art form, finds its greatness in its expression of the human spirit, and, to me, this can't be reduced to a contest.
Bennie Wallace
#7. Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.
Andy Richter
#9. It might seem a contradiction but... the ability to improvise requires lots of practice. Ask any jazz musician.
Ted Agon
#10. I actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that.
Douglas Booth
#11. It is rare that even a jazz musician finds an individual voice.
David Baker
#12. 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
#13. I would not describe myself as an avid jazz fan and I am not a jazz musician myself. However, that is not to say that jazz does not play a vital and important role in my life.
Nat Wolff
#14. 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
#15. The worst thing about the life of a jazz musician on the road is getting to the gig. Once you're there and playing, it's marvelous.
Dave Brubeck
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I really love jazz, but I will never be a jazz musician as much as I dream. But, I think that the jazz music I love is there in my music.
Laura Mvula
#20. Many an American jazz musician has been beguiled by the lush melodies and sumptuous rhythms of Brazilian music, but Peter Sprague has taken the romance a good deal further than most.
Andrew S. Gilbert
#21. I don't think I've ever been true to jazz. There's always a kind of jazz element to what I do. There are a very few genres that I haven't tried out, really, in what I've been doing. As a jazz musician, you can kind of mess about with things with a certain level of musicianship, which helps.
Jamie Cullum
#22. I don't listen to a lot of music when I have my free time. But I'll go to a jazz club and have a drink and listen to a good jazz musician. Or sometimes in the morning, if I want to put myself in a good mood, I'll put on some Latin music.
Joshua Bell
#23. I knew I could never be accepted as a straight-ahead jazz musician, nor would Iaccept myself as that. I would never be accepted as a minimalist. I wouldn't be adowntown composer. Because I find all orthodoxies, all doctrines to be ultimatelybanal.
Anthony Davis
#24. A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
Benny Green
#25. I started as a musician. I play the saxophone, but from the age of 17, I realised that it's very hard to make a living as a jazz musician in Australia. So I went for an audition and got an acting job and, fortunately, I completely fell in love with that.
John Polson
#26. You've got to do what you know before you know what you're doing."
Duke Madison, Jazz Musician
Andy Martello
#27. As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty.
Doc Childre
#28. Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.
Sheena Iyengar
#29. The age of 18 seemed the right time to try something different in my life. Moving to the U.K. was a risk, and I was never confident that I could ever make a full-time living being a musician, but I had to try. Initially, I worked as a jazz musician in pubs or with bands.
Manfred Mann
#30. My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented!
Gaspard Ulliel
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. When I was a kid, I wanted desperately to be a jazz musician. I would practice the trumpet for hours, but when I got braces, that messed up my ability to play, so all of a sudden I had all this free time.
Zach Woods
#34. I went to Juilliard in New York and used to do cabarets just for fun. Occasionally, I would get together with a jazz musician and play at a restaurant for cash. And I've done some background vocals for recording artists.
Nicole Beharie
#35. 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
#36. I'd have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I'd just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.
Bobby Seale
#38. As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also.
Wynton Marsalis
#39. 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
#40. A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.
Charlie Trotter
#41. 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
#42. I was always very leery of my piano playing. As a young kid, I wanted to be a jazz musician, but my taste was far greater than my ability.
Mike Stoller
#43. I don't think of myself as a jazz musician but a medicine man.
Abdullah Ibrahim
#44. To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician) ... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.
Randy Sandke
#45. I'm a jazz musician by education and vocation, but I don't think jazz should [ dictate] what I want to do.
Dave Douglas
#46. I know I'm an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I'm not a jazz musician. I'm not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It's in between these areas.
Anthony Braxton
#47. You know, it's funny ... when you're making money, people don't think you're playing jazz. Now when you're not making money, people think that you're a good jazz musician.
Pete Fountain
#48. When I'm working behind a camera, I feel like I'm trying to achieve something like a jazz musician does.
Jack Welpott
#49. I fear that I won't get better and that I won't have time to practice. To be called a "jazz musician" - it's a big responsibility.
Esperanza Spalding
#50. 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
#51. I always tell my students when you're going to be a jazz musician the first thing you've got to do is be a professional musician, and that means you have to feed yourself with the instrument.
Lester Bowie
#52. I got my love of jazz from my stepfather, who was a jazz musician.
Flea
#53. I play classical music almost exclusively. I never mastered jazz or gospel in the way that my mother did. She was a fine improvisational musician. I pretty much have to stick to what's written on the page.
Condoleezza Rice
#54. It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.
Harry Connick Jr.
#55. The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.
Buddy Guy
#56. I started to listen to Japanese jazz musicians when I went to high school. Some people I listened to were Yosuke Yamashita, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sadao Watanabe.
Hiromi
#57. Many of the jazz musicians whom are no longer here. You don't realize that it's history when it is happening and then time passes and you look at a picture and you say "Wow, there is history attached to that."
Carol Friedman
#58. 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
#59. Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.
Gunther Schuller
#60. At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.
Herbie Hancock
#61. You know, Equal Interest played at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival Awards and not one musician from that category was even thought of. Even thought of! The idea, that here's this vital energy, and that element doesn't even know it exists!
Joseph Jarman
#62. I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.
Molly Ringwald
#63. I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.
Terry Teachout
#64. I have no illusions about being a genius musician. I pride myself on being a soldier, a warrior for jazz. I trained a lot of young people, and I've learned my lessons well. I'd like to keep the flame burning.
Phil Woods
#65. I started singing Folksongs with my mother when I was 6 years old. We sang at Folk festivals and concerts and schools. There was always music being played either on record, Jazz and Folk, by musician friends of my mother. I took to singing very early, I believe it has been a Gift I was born with.
Vicki Sue Robinson
#66. Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
Yo-Yo Ma
#67. I was a wise-a** college student of twenty at the time and a precocious musician, with somewhat of that screw-you-I'm-a-jazz-player attitude.
Gene Hull
#68. Jazz musicians are the coolest people on the planet. Can I have some cool?
Jon Stewart
#69. It's funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don't learn jazz in school.
Paul Horn
#70. Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal.
Darryl Pinckney
#71. I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.
Dave Van Ronk
#72. But if you want to be a songwriter-based musician, whether you play punk or rock or country or jazz, whatever, you have to work on your songwriting and you have to work on being able to play in front of people, I think. That performance is how you create the groundwork for a lasting career.
Amy Ray
#73. 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
#75. 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
#76. He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.
Oscar Peterson
#77. Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician
Wynton Marsalis
#78. Marijuana is taken by musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type ...
Harry J. Anslinger
#79. Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night.
Miles Kington
#80. 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
#81. 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
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