Quotes About Jazz And Life

#1. Jazz felt as though his own life was a mindfield, one he'd lost the map for. One wrong step and he'd lose a foot or leg. or his mind.

Barry Lyga

#2. I have this theory that I hold on to, the theory that everything great in art and in life in general is jazz. It's just like all these things that just kind of seem to fall into place. You know, like mistakes that somehow turn into something beautiful.

Jerrod Carmichael

#3. Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Wynton Marsalis

#4. 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

#5. Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

Aberjhani

#6. The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.

Ahmet Ertegun

#7. 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

#8. Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.

Nat Wolff

#9. I was a jazz drummer, and it was my life for a while: what I lived and breathed every day.

Damien Chazelle

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

Kenneth Rexroth

#13. Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.

Sonny Rollins

#14. 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

#15. Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

Branford Marsalis

#16. Make no mistake, this music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen to your Snoop Doggy Dog, Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, but add a little Ellington, Basie and Coltrane to your life as well.

Christian McBride

#17. If it sounds good and feels good, then it IS good!

Duke Ellington

#18. Jazz hadn't given her many details of exactly what life in the Dent house had been like, but he'd told her enough that she knew it wasn't hearts and flowers. Well, except for the occasional heart cut from a chest. And the kind of flowers you send to funerals.

Barry Lyga

#19. There is no truer truth obtainable by Man than comes of music

Robert Browning

#20. Each man has his own music bubbling up inside him.

Louis Armstrong

#21. The brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.

Diane Ackerman

#22. Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread
without it, it's flat.

Carmen McRae

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.

Amiri Baraka

#28. In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.

Charles Mingus

#29. The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

Aberjhani

#30. I missed jazz, kind of. And by the time I came to it in life, it was too intimidating to enjoy thoroughly.

Warren Zevon

#31. Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.

Pat Martino

#32. I was in a competing company and have been dancing since I was four - ballet, tap, jazz, hip hop - so it's a huge part of my life and my music.

Tinashe

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

Sonny Rollins

#34. I studied the lives of jazz singers who would tour Europe, and ... what I learned was life was big ride for them. They'd seen the dark side of humanity ... but touring the world playing jazz, it was a truly carefree way of living. A great escapism, if you like.

Gary Carr

#35. Music is a huge part of my life, I enjoy every genre of music from jazz to country, and I even get down with a bit of hip hop.

Nicole Richie

#36. Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom.

Charlie Parker

#37. If you're an impressionistic painter and you want to paint expressionism, you've got to change. You've got to figure out a way to do it and do it. If you've been playing jazz all your life and you want to start to play rock n' roll, blues, then do it.

Tobin Bell

#38. I've been dancing my entire life. Jazz, hip hop, ballet. And then there's tap dancing. I love to tap.

Emily VanCamp

#39. You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.

Eric Burdon

#40. Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with.

Paul Horn

#41. 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

#42. Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.

Langston Hughes