Jazz Up Quotes

#1. Once 'A.N.T. Farm' started, I was inspired by Chyna to jazz up my style. Now I paint my nails bright, fun colors and add a bunch of accessories and some cool shoes to jeans and a T-shirt.

China Anne McClain

#2. I think the challenges for me was to go into the studio with these incredible jazz players and come up to their level of excellence. That's always a challenge.

Rita Coolidge

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Around middle school I studied jazz guitar and ended up playing in a jazz band for a bit. But, after high school, I haven't even touched a guitar.

Mike Tucker

#8. You know I want to sing for people, I want to jazz people up I want to make new music that they've never heard.

Casey Abrams

#9. 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

#10. I wanted to play some more grown-up music - jazz.

Rick Derringer

#11. I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.

Paul Desmond

#12. The public, hearing pop music, is, without knowing it, also soaking up jazz.

Norman Granz

#13. Shut up and let me see your jazz hands

Gerard Way

#14. 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

#15. Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain't feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin' for the post office because music don't pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don't love you.

Walter Mosley

#16. Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.

Eberhard Weber

#17. We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Patti Smith

#18. 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

#19. This is our bandstand. If you don't want to play, get up off the instrument and leave.

Wynton Marsalis

#20. Shoes are a big part of your look. I think that if your outfit isn't really something special, then fun footwear is a great way to jazz it up and make your ensemble more interesting.

Christian Siriano

#21. 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

#22. I like to go hear jazz late-night up in Harlem.

Daniel Boulud

#23. You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.

Oscar Peterson

#24. My mother was into opera and my father was into jazz, so there was a lot of jazz in the house where I grew up.

Chaka Khan

#25. I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.

Kimbra

#26. I grew up listening to John Coltrane and jazz, so they were subtle influences. I sometimes think about doing some kind of weird jazz record, but I don't know ... It's on my list of things to do. I don't want to have to then go promote it.

Kim Gordon

#27. I grew up listening to everything. You know, from Argentinean folk music, tango, jazz, rock, just everything.

Gustavo Santaolalla

#28. I used to be a jazz snob, believe it or not. I sort of turned my nose up at anything more commercial.

Norah Jones

#29. I grew up listening to Beethoven and old jazz singers like Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Anita O'Day. But those were, like, the only women I listened to - I hated women pop singers.

Sophie B. Hawkins

#30. I had a very thorough grounding in music; I'd grown up around songs. My parents listened to a lot of music. My dad was majorly into jazz, which was absolutely a big influence on me, even if it was more subconsciously as a kid.

Laura Mvula

#31. Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I'm on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes.

Chuck Mangione

#32. Being grown-up is boring. Besides, I don't get jazz.

Patrick Star

#33. Growing up, I listened and was influenced by a lot of those around me. I have a big family, and my dad listened to '80s music, my mom listened to Motown, my brother listened to reggae, and my granddad was the one that got me into jazz and swing music.

Ella Henderson

#34. Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it's not a fad. It's up to us to see to it that it stays alive.

Marla Gibbs

#35. At 3 A.M., I'm still up watching videos of jazz heroes I never saw live. It's so thrilling. And not just the music. The Internet is changing the future of fund-raising. I'm thrilled by the potential.

Bonnie Raitt

#36. I'm reserved, so I've always needed to find a way of opening up. Jazz helped me do that.

Renee Fleming

#37. People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

Roy Ayers

#38. I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.

Miles Davis

#39. Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers ...

Pat Metheny

#40. I used to hang out a lot in jazz clubs, and the groups took to a kid like me who wasn't afraid to get up and sing with a jazz band. Then I started to hang out in rock clubs and learned to carry off different styles.

Eric Burdon

#41. Now as jazz musicians we're saying for this society, you can free up your imagination. You can proceed in an area without much information and you can function in an area without much information.

Paul Bley

#42. My grandfather was a massive influence in my music. Growing up, he would play a lot of old-school records to me. A lot of jazz and swing music, actually, growing up.

Ella Henderson

#43. I love jazz and pop rock and country. I grew up listening to Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Def Leppard, AC/DC, Anne Murray - if I hear something really great ... I want to be a part of it.

Natalie MacMaster

#44. I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.

Travis Barker

#45. When I'm in the classical world, I really treat it as exactly classical and I don't try and spruce it up or jazz it up or make it easier for the masses.

Rufus Wainwright

#46. Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.

Talib Kweli

#47. I grew up listening to hipster jazz and classical records ... we went and watched ballet and orchestras - lots of cool stuff. Which I'm really grateful for - it's pretty nice being introduced to that when you're little.

Courtney Barnett

#48. Everything we did, we did live - and then Bobby took it home and chopped it up and edited it. Which is pretty much what they did with every jazz record you've ever heard.

Charlie Hunter

#49. 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

#50. Brubeck, for instance, is not careless. He's a studied guy. And even if his picture ends up on the back cover of Life, he's still a studious guy.

Eddie Condon

#51. All I have to do is wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, Jazz. Everything else is optional.

Barry Lyga

#52. The singer who really opened the door for me was Sarah Vaughan. But I listen to so much music, especially when I was growing up. My parents loved jazz music, so on Saturday [laughing] it would be the "Longine's Symphonettes," and on Sunday it was Mahalia Jackson.

Dianne Reeves

#53. The jazz clubs wind up having only rich tourists - the kids can't come. If they do, then they spend their entire monthly allotments on a 45-minute set.

John Scofield

#54. I started playing trumpet when I was 11 years old. All I wanted to be was a jazz trumpet player when I grew up.

Flea

#55. Around age 11 or 12, I started playing jazz bass. From there, I went to electric bass and then guitar, which I kept up for a long time.

Joshua Roman

#56. Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

Bobby McFerrin

#57. Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

Dave Van Ronk

#58. Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.

Jan Hammer

#59. Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

Lee Konitz

#60. One two, one two,
Type a word or two.
Arrow left, arrow right,
Keep those fingers nice and tight.
Keys up, Keys down,
Move those digits all around.
One two, one two,
Type a word or two.

Jazz Feylynn

#61. I wasn't a dancer learning to play Baby Houseman. I was Baby Houseman learning to play a dancer. I was someone who'd never done any Latin dance. I'd taken jazz classes and ballet growing up in New York, so I had dance in me, and I knew I loved it, but I'd never done a dance audition.

Jennifer Grey

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. I grew up with classical music blasting in my parents' living room and my older brother's practicing saxophone in his room listening to jazz ... a beautiful chaos.

Josephine De La Baume

#65. There's only two ways to sum up music; either it's good or it's bad. If it's good you don't mess about it, you just enjoy it.

Louis Armstrong

#66. I think with me and the type of music that I'm trying to make, it's always going be soulful because I grew up listening to different types and variations of soulful melodies and jazz, but experimenting with different types of stylistic souls.

Charlie Puth

#67. I was a total music nerd. I grew up on Perry Street in the '80s. My father wrote books about jazz, so I was always at the 'Village Vanguard.'

Andrew Wyatt

#68. I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

Amy Tan

#69. 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

#70. He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

Geoff Dyer

#71. A lot of the people that I photograph are master musicians themselves, whether they're singers or great jazz players and it's kind of fun to figure out who they came up with and who they emulated or who they idolized actually.

Carol Friedman

#72. Up to the age of 14 I had not heard a note of anything before 1750, never heard a note of Bach, never heard anything after Wagner, and never heard any real jazz.

Steve Reich

#73. I've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like jazz needs a big-ass slap.

Robert Glasper

#74. The best gift I was ever given was the arts. My mum gave me those on a silver platter. Growing up, her and my grandmother would take me to ballets, classical concerts, even smoky jazz clubs I wasn't supposed to be in!

Jill Scott

#75. My father is a massive, massive music fan. I grew up listening to rock, soul and jazz.

Kieran Hebden

#76. 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

#77. Hip-hop is mostly what I listen to, other than jazz. I've given up on pop music and indie rock.

Jess Row

#78. I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.

Sonny Rollins

#79. I really didn't know a lot of rock 'n' roll until I moved to L.A. Before that, when I was in New York, I grew up listening mostly to R&B and soul and jazz.

Lenny Kravitz

#80. I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I'm his ideal.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#81. Edward Isaac Bickert in never one to blow his own horn - figuratively - he is one of the most modest and unassuming men in Jazz. But literally - he blows up a storm .

Frank Rutter

#82. There's a destination,a little up the road. From the habitations and the towns we know. A place we saw the lights turn low. The jig-saw jazz and the get-fresh flow

Beck

#83. Jane Monheit is skyrocketing up the jazz charts. By next year, we won't be able to get her.

Jane Monheit

#84. My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up. He loved Lenny [Bruce]. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beatnik-y, you know, for Salt Lake City. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me.

Judd Apatow

#85. The whole idea of jazz came about was the interpretation of the human dialogue, trading fours. When someone's soloing and someone picks up the solo and plays it back at 'em, it was the imitation of the human dialogue. It was how people spoke, through music.

Wendell Pierce

#86. Growing up playing jazz and improvising has had a big impact on me, and it translates into my music.

Stephen Bruner

#87. 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

#88. I always thought jazz was like the trunk of a tree. After the tree has grown, many branches have spread out. They're all with different leaves and they all look beautiful. But at the end of the season, they fold back up and it's still the tree trunk.

Earl Hines

#89. I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

Baz Luhrmann

#90. I didn't really grow up on hip-hop. Ella Fitzgerald and the old school jazz divas are more my comfort zone.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

#91. That did explain his sucky home life growing up but didn't excuse the way he treated others. Was there childcare for abused werewolves?

Jazz Feylynn

#92. I guess I learnt to appreciate old Hindi-movie music from my dad and somewhere down the line picked up jazz as well.

Deepika Padukone

#93. I came along in the '60s having absorbed as much as I could up until then and added my own tastes and search into the equation. I guess that's how I see 'Now He Sings, Now He Sobs' in relation to the development of jazz in general.

Chick Corea

#94. I was really fortunate growing up to have a broad musical education. My parents listened to all kinds of music, rock, soul, Motown, jazz, Frank Sinatra, everything.

Mayer Hawthorne

#95. For the last day or so there had been a certain amount of coolness in the home over a pair of jazz spats which I had dug up while exploring in the Burlington Arcade.

P.G. Wodehouse

#96. I never gave up on that idea, you know, that jazz musicians have the same opportunity as everybody else and that it's what you put on that record that makes the difference whether you sell it or not or are able to get it into people's households.

George Benson

#97. I don't want to be a free nigger; I want to be a free man."
"Don't we all. Look. Be what you want
white or black. Choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black, meaning draw your manhood up - quicklike, and don't bring me no whiteboy sass."
Hunter's Hunter and Godlen Gray

Toni Morrison

#98. When I was a little kid I thought I would grow up to be black and sing jazz in nightclubs.

Molly Ringwald

#99. In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

Wynton Marsalis

#100. When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.

Flea