Quotes About Jazz

#1. I did listen to 1920s jazz or Al Johnson and a lot of early singers coming out of England. I would branch out a little bit to get a sense of the world that he might be coming into, in the '30s when jazz was changing.

Ed Speleers

#2. It just so happens that my oldest and best friend is Bob James, the Grammy-winning great jazz pianist!

Jack O'Brien

#3. This assignment could damn well project all the words across my face and the ink stain my hands a gory mess before I finished it.

Jazz Feylynn

#4. I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.

Sonny Rollins

#5. I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.

Herbie Hancock

#6. I've been a massive obsessive about jazz singers all my life.

Eddi Reader

#7. The first thing is, jazz is one of the few things to let you know that there is a God and there is a creation.

Billy Higgins

#8. Even though I left for a year, I grew here as a Jazz man. If I'm fortunate enough to go into the Hall of Fame, I will go as a Jazz man.

Karl Malone

#9. The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.

Paul Weller

#10. 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

#11. I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic ... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.

Joe Carnahan

#12. Many jazz artists go to L.A. seeking a more comfortable life and then they really stop playing.

Sonny Rollins

#13. Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.

Donald Miller

#14. I always wanted praise, and I always wanted attention; I won't lie to you. I was a jazz critic, and that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them. So I thought, 'What could I do? I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act or anything like that. OK, I can write.'

Harvey Pekar

#15. As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

Stan Getz

#16. Anyone who understands Jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's what's so simple about it.

Yogi Berra

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. I have two main bass guitars, and my main bass is a four-string 1964 Fender Jazz, and I've named it Justine.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner

#20. Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

Sonny Rollins

#21. Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.

Duke Ellington

#22. My style is a little quirky. I can't play as fast as most professional jazz players.

Donald Fagen

#23. We couldn't go on indefinitely being swept off our feet.

Zelda Fitzgerald

#24. I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.

Norman Granz

#25. Trouble follows me wherever I go. Thing I'm in is just a sack o'woe.

Jon Hendricks

#26. There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.

Pat Metheny

#27. 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.

#28. 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

#29. Jazz vampires,' said Stephanopoulos.
'I wish I hadn't started calling them that,' I said.

Ben Aaronovitch

#30. 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

#31. Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.

Wynton Marsalis

#32. I'm moved by a lot of different kinds of music, whether it's pop music or R&B or straight-ahead jazz or free or opera or music from all parts of the world.

David Sanborn

#33. I took the frets out of my bass after I was getting into jazz a lot and I wanted to have that upright sound.

Jaco Pastorius

#34. I was taking chemical engineering. But I went into the army after that. When I came out of the army, I was a different person. I met a lot of good jazz players in the army.

Mose Allison

#35. As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

Jim Coleman

#36. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

Don DeLillo

#37. 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

#38. We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.

David Amram

#39. 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

#40. I have believed for many years that Oscar Peterson is not only the greatest pianist in jazz today, but the greatest it has ever known.

Gene Lees

#41. 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

#42. The difference between blues, jazz, rock n' roll and rap is that rap stayed poor. Even the white rappers are poor. It's scarier to look at poor people; it makes everyone uncomfortable. Their pain is something that people would like to see swept under the rug.

Russell Simmons

#43. In 1994, I started touring again and I recorded two albums for Chesky Jazz.

Chuck Mangione

#44. 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

#45. When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside - jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely. We

Denis Johnson

#46. You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.

Adam Mansbach

#47. 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

#48. I'm very influenced by jazz drummers. I always liked drummers like Roger Taylor, Keith Moon, Ian Paice, John Densmore. I just learned from playing to those drummers.

Steven Adler

#49. I do find modern jazz quite tricky.

Jane Asher

#50. And jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in

Julio Cortazar

#51. Jazz is the music of unemployment.

Frank Zappa

#52. I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

Brian Eno

#53. Jazz voices that unvanquishable, natural will toward creaativity and self-expression, depite everything, in the here and now.

Stephanie Mills

#54. I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

Gary Lucas

#55. 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

#56. But, I tell myself, Weight is just an artifact of gravity. If this were a jazz club on the moon, I would weigh less.

Weike Wang

#57. Tone on jazz guitars is a real tough issue.

Mark White

#58. 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

#59. I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.

Bela Fleck

#60. My nerves did a jitter dance, stuck between two wolves.

Jazz Feylynn

#61. Science teachers and the mentally ill, that's all Jazz is for.

Noel Fielding

#62. Yes, I have been studying piano since I was six. Classical, jazz, compositional, Broadway, everything. I just love it all.

Janel Parrish

#63. The "Highway 61" album [of Bob Dylan] was produced by Bob Johnston if I'm not incorrect. And Bob Johnston was an entirely different producer than Tom Wilson. Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.

Al Kooper

#64. I think there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. They're the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.

Gerald Early

#65. When the subsidies are going out there to fund arts, I'd like to see jazz given a better shake of the dice. It attracts as many people as opera does, but not the subsidies.

Sebastian Coe

#66. 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

#67. Dali's Reclining Woman Wearing a Chemise looks like a dead slaughtered doll, and I can see preying eagles, broken arrows, and jazz musicians in Jackson Pollock, and because I believe that Man Ray and Duchamp were lovers.

Dionne Brand

#68. Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its ... It deals with it!

Wynton Marsalis

#69. 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

#70. Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

Miles Davis

#71. Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.

Paul Desmond

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

Norman Granz

#73. Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

John Lurie

#74. My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.

Damien Chazelle

#75. Jazz is about being in the moment.

Herbie Hancock

#76. Dizzy Gillespie, the jazz trumpet player, once said, "It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play." He was one of my special ones. And he was quite correct. Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But

Mitch Albom

#77. It's not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

Les Paul

#78. ...and yes that was meant to be interpreted in a sarcastic bubblegum tone complete with clapping and jazz hands.

K.R. Grace

#79. It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

Herbie Hancock

#80. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

Studs Terkel

#81. I'm a great jazz fan.

Vidal Sassoon

#82. 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

#83. Jazz is an art that takes decades to appreciate and understand.

Jake Shimabukuro

#84. [Jazz singing] is like pornography. You can't say what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Kurt Elling

#85. 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

#86. I'm a trumpet player, and I sing jazz.

Colin Salmon

#87. I like rock music. I like jazz better, though.

Clarke Peters

#88. My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.

Walter Becker

#89. New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.

Tim Cahill

#90. 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

#91. He took comfort in the neon signs, the wild strands of jazz creeping out of clubs whenever happy swells of people pushed through the doors in their finery.

Libba Bray

#92. The kid come in at a strange angle, made the notes glitter like crystal.

Esi Edugyan

#93. I'm not intelligent. I'm not arrogant. I'm just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn't want to become a writer - it just happened.

Haruki Murakami

#94. You know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to record some white Chicago jazz.

Ahmet Ertegun

#95. ... he didn't needs words or even want them because he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear.

Toni Morrison

#96. Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence ...

Pat Metheny

#97. I have truly eclectic taste in music, and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; world music, Brit-pop, classic rock, blues/jazz, even the odd bit of heavy metal.

Rachel Miner

#98. I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

Wyclef Jean

#99. To me, 'Blue Like Jazz' is a quintessential American story. So many people are just like Don - raised Christian and go off to college only to abandon their beliefs in order to fit in or be accepted.

Marshall Allman

#100. 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