Old Jazz Sayings

#1. 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

#2. Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old '60s songs. She loves songwriters from the '70s that I hate, like Jim Croce and James Taylor, and she loves Stevie Nicks and old jazz classics.

Denis Leary

#3. The static's nice. I could do without the screeching."
"Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

Peter Watts

#4. I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.

Walter Becker

#5. I grew up with all these old jazz guys in the '70s in L.A., and they grew up idolizing Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Lester Young - all of these incredible musicians.

Flea

#6. I guess my biggest influence was actually my Grandfather. He used to play old records on vinyl, and would play old jazz and soul music like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and The Rat Pack and swing music.

Ella Henderson

#7. There's so much around, you don't know what to listen to. All I've got at home is Bo Diddley, some Stones and Beatles stuff, and old jazz records.

Syd Barrett

#8. I listen to old jazz and classical music, and that's it.

Kenny G

#9. The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

Lucinda Williams

#10. I would love to do a biopic of a famous singer, like Diana Ross or Donna Summer, or an old jazz story that we haven't seen before. I would love to do that! I would love to play Diana Ross 'cause she's an icon. I'm salivating to do that.

Taraji P. Henson

#11. It's great to know that our old stuff still sounds good to our fans, just as it's wonderful to think that we've turned a few people on to jazz over the years.

Donald Fagen

#12. jazz is punk for old people. I guess that explains it, because I don't like punk, either.

Gayle Forman

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.

Steve Lacy

#16. It's almost worse because you think that you're mature and classic when you're in the newsie cap jazz phase. It's not a great look, a young person trying to seem old and mature and cultured. That's a summarily not-cool look.

Nick Kroll

#17. 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

#18. I'd actually been making my living as an organist with bands since I was probably 15 or 16 years old, and then as a senior in high school I put together a jazz quintet called The Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet.

Bobby McFerrin

#19. You have to enjoy playing. The old-timers did, and that's one reason why their music is a lasting music. I feel that I play jazz to entertain the listener, and you just can't do that unless you yourself are entertained at the same time.

Barry Harris

#20. 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

#21. Well, I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gonna keep playin'

Clark Terry

#22. 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

#23. He fell for an eighteen-year old girl with one of those deepdown spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.

Toni Morrison

#24. I did ballet, jazz and flamenco from when I was five years old. And my professional career started with dancing in musicals.

Jennifer Lopez

#25. I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

Steve Lacy

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

Tori Amos

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. It's bluesy, rocky jazz. I call it soul music, but it's not James Brown soul music. It comes from my soul. It comes from a deeper place. Duffy has that similar old school soul sound to herself. If I opened for Duffy, that would make sense to me, in my head.

Tinsel Korey

#34. 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

#35. In the year of 1902, when I was about seventeen years old, I happened to invade one of the sections [in New Orleans] where the birth of Jazz originated from.

Jelly Roll Morton

#36. 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

#37. I was 16 years old, and I was just flailing around, looking for an interest. I heard, you know, these jazz records. They were modern records, at the time in the '50s, and I realized that I didn't fully get what was going on. But I liked a lot of what I heard.

Harvey Pekar

#38. 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

#39. I don't know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.

Norman Granz

#40. I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.

Herbie Hancock