Top 100 Music Jazz Quotes
#1. 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
#2. There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.
Robert Wyatt
#3. 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.
#4. Regarding jam sessions: Jazz musicians are the only workers I can think of who are willing to put in a full shift for pay and then go somewhere else and continue to work for free.
George Carlin
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence ...
Pat Metheny
#8. If it hadn't worked out professionally, I would be teaching music theory and composition in a small college somewhere and playing drums in a jazz trio at the Holiday Inn on weekends, and I'd be happy there, too.
J. D. Souther
#9. I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.
Paul Desmond
#10. The public, hearing pop music, is, without knowing it, also soaking up jazz.
Norman Granz
#11. Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.
Horace Silver
#12. There were a lot of R&B groups that were my heroes, but the funny thing about my career and the way it went and where it went, at first I didn't really want to do pop music. I was a little bit more into jazz and R&B.
Frankie Valli
#14. The philosophy of jazz represents tolerance, teamwork and inclusion. That's what America is about. The music reflects that.
T. S. Monk
#15. 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
#16. I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people.
Brian McKnight
#18. You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.
John Abercrombie
#19. One thing I like about jazz, kid, is that I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?
Bix Beiderbecke
#20. 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
#21. Jazz, Miss Lily, is the bastard child of music, born from the old Negro work song by a whole lot of fine daddies who ain't about to claim it.
Beatriz Williams
#22. I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock ... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.
Jimmy Page
#23. There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.
Harry J. Anslinger
#24. It's always Jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes she's the same old broad.
Lionel Hampton
#25. 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
#27. Jazz has the ability to absorb & transform influences from diverse musical styles.
Andrew S. Gilbert
#28. Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!
Miles Davis
#29. 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
#30. Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend.
George Gershwin
#31. I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy.
Fred Durst
#32. Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.
Madeleine Peyroux
#33. One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.
Branford Marsalis
#34. English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.
Yann Martel
#35. I progressed through so many different styles of music through my teen years, both as a player and a vocalist, particularly the jazz and pop of the early 20th Century.
Jeff Healey
#36. Jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
Cab Calloway
#37. Miles got a mystique about him-plus he's at the top of his profession. And he's got way, way, way more money.
Dizzy Gillespie
#38. I made a good living for a teenager. And I had to learn all different kinds of music - jazz, swing, Motown, pop - and that inspired what kind of music I started to write.
Idina Menzel
#40. I can only be me. I do what I do, I'm not a jazz player ... I don't play jazz standards, at least not in any recognizable way. It's not my turf but I have plenty of respect for that style of playing.
Jorma Kaukonen
#41. 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
#42. I wanted to look at the mentality that can breed that sort of intensity, that kind of cutthroat, pressure-cooker feeling, especially a form of music like jazz, that should be - or you'd think should be - all about liberation and improvisation and everything.
Damien Chazelle
#43. 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.
#45. I'm saddened to see that everyone's pitched out the baby with the bath, in that we say that it can't be one or the other, it could be both. I mean, just because we listen to classical music doesn't mean that we can't listen to jazz.
Don Bluth
#47. They call it music, but it's just this side of magic.
Harold Jones
#48. I wake up late, say 10 or 11, because we've usually been out and about town until 2 or 3 A.M. listening to music at the jazz clubs or hitting the jazz clubs post-theater.
Tamara Tunie
#49. I just try to do as good job with the material as I can and play some jazz as well, some improvised music, and do that every night. Just see where it goes.
Mose Allison
#50. Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise ... but a way of life.
Lester Bowie
#51. I was very adamant about not being called a jazz singer, but now I've embraced it. The way I approach music is through jazz, so I'm a jazz singer.
Dee Dee Bridgewater
#52. For me personally - because I do it myself - the scoring of a picture is fun. I edit the picture and when I've finished I go into my room and I have many many records - jazz, classical and popular music. And I have this all at my disposal. I don't have to get a composer.
Woody Allen
#53. 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
#54. Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.
Percy Heath
#55. Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!
Christian Scott
#56. I've had the pleasure of playing with the baddest Jazz cats on the planet.
George Benson
#58. My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.
Anthony Braxton
#59. 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
#60. Music was not a big deal to me when I was in middle school. And then I slowly became a big jazz fan. Even more than concerts, a lot of my high school time was spent going to jazz clubs in the city.
Nick Kroll
#61. Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.
Maynard Ferguson
#62. To me, jazz is the closest thing to insanity that there is in music.
David
#63. He didn't say nothing. He would just do things. He never said nothing or explained nothing. He just would do it and that was it. You were on your own. You had to be very independent being around John [Coltrane].
Pharoah Sanders
#64. I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.
Erik Larson
#65. My father had played cornet, although I never saw him play it. I found his mouthpiece when I was a kid. I used to buzz it. And my mother played piano and sang in the church choir for different functions. So there was always music in the house, jazz, gospel, or whatever. Especially jazz records.
Johnny Griffin
#66. We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.
Wynton Marsalis
#67. Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains
John Philip Sousa
#68. There's no such thing as a wrong note.
Art Tatum
#69. I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.
Billy Higgins
#70. I listen to all those kinds of music, from classic soul to hip-hop to Brazilian music to, you know, jazz to indie to alternative. So whatever. I listen to all if it. Classic rock and classic pop, all of that.
John Legend
#71. Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk
John Lewis
#72. The greatest contribution jazz has made in music has been to replace the role of the conductor with a member of the ensemble who, instead of waving his arms to keep time and convey mood, is an active member of the musical statement. That person is the drummer.
Elvin Jones
#73. Man, if you have to ask what it [jazz] is, you'll never know.
Louis Armstrong
#74. Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.
Cassandra Wilson
#75. As a rule, my focus is on classical music, but I love jazz. I love everything, actually.
Julie Andrews
#76. I listen to all kinds of songs. There's something to be learned from every type of music and from the one making it, whether it's pop or jazz or hip-hop.
Brian McKnight
#77. From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.
Athol Fugard
#78. When I was playing piano, it was like, 'I'm going to write a song using all the white keys.' My music director, who knew my jazz background, suggested I try big-band music, so we spent a year experimenting with it in concert, and the audience reaction was really good.
John Tesh
#79. Music is something I couldn't live without. My dad was into music, he played for pleasure - guitar, piano. I started off doing jazz, singing with a lot of fabulous musicians here in London before I went to the States. And I still take piano lessons every Wednesday.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste
#80. 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
#81. There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.
Boris Vian
#82. I'm interested in music, not in my image. If someone plays something fantastic, that I could never have thought of, it makes me happy to know it exists.
Ornette Coleman
#83. It's much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn't listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, '67.
David Bowie
#84. Jazz is such a powerful cultural statement that it's almost as if it's intertwined with society.
Tom Harrell
#85. I prefer music where melody, harmony and rhythm come together and no one element overshadows the other. Jazz at its best is a democracy of creativity.
Jimmy Heath
#86. That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.
Dave Brubeck
#87. Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.
Nina Simone
#88. I like to listen to classical music ... I like mainline jazz.
Herb Alpert
#89. When I was very young, there was a lot of music at home, mostly jazz. I was walking around singing and pretending I was in bands from a very young age. But the first song that was really personal to me was 'Blue Suede Shoes'.
Nile Rodgers
#90. I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
Jill Scott
#91. I'm not a one-stop music shop with jazz improv in aisle 3 and country and western in aisle 4. I have a fairly focused and established kind of melody and approach, so people know what they're getting into when they go into business with me.
Charlie Clouser
#92. That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America
no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.
Art Blakey
#93. This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human.
Matt Haig
#94. Jazz told people about the special music that came out of America and about America in general and this kind of liberty and freedom that we have.
Al Jarreau
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. If one takes all the styles in jazz harmonically from the earliest beginnings to the latest experiments, he still has a rather limited scope when compared to the rest of music in the world.
Don Ellis
#98. Jazz has a strong following in certain circles and there are annual jazz festivals in Puerto Plata and at Casa de Teatro in the capital. Grammy-winning Dominican jazz pianist Michael Camilo has had success on a global level. The classical music and ballet
Ginnie Bedggood
#99. All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.
Terry Teachout
#100. 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
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