Top 100 Quotes About Jazz Music
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.
Romare Bearden
#6. Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful.
Jesse Stone
#7. Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two great American institutions.
Henry Rollins
#8. Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It's what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.
Wynton Marsalis
#9. Next to jazz music, there is nothing that lifts the spirit and strengthens the soul more than a good bowl of chili.
Harry James
#10. 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
#11. I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.
Sonny Rollins
#12. Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways.
Pat Metheny
#13. 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
#14. This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
Adrienne Rich
#15. I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy.
Fred Durst
#16. People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.
Wynton Marsalis
#17. English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets.
Yann Martel
#19. Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.
David Sanborn
#20. The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land.
Ken Burns
#21. 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
#23. 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.
#24. I played Big Band jazz music. I wasn't into rock and roll. I was just there because it was a living. I surprised everyone. I'm still surprising people.
Bobby Vinton
#25. Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.
Jan Hammer
#26. Scott Feiner is a soulful magnet for the fusion of Brazilian and jazz music ...
Kurt Rosenwinkel
#28. I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.
Nat Wolff
#30. And where jazz music was concerned, there was a saying, Segodnia on igraet dzhaz, a zavtra rodinu prodast: Today you play jazz, tomorrow you betray the motherland." Igor,
Michael Segell
#31. Louis Armstrong was the primary contributor to jazz music in the 20th century. His improvisational skills served as the principal model for all who came after him, regardless of one's chosen instrument.
Ellis Marsalis Jr.
#32. Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.
Maynard Ferguson
#34. Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.
Wynton Marsalis
#35. Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles.
Henry Van Dyke
#36. I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then.
Miles Teller
#37. If you don't already know about jazz music, how would you be exposed? How would get an opportunity to find out if it spoke to you? If you get exposed to it enough, you might find a taste for it.
Esperanza Spalding
#38. Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.
Toots Thielemans
#39. And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it.
DJ Jazzy Jeff
#40. New Orleans is a place where people are deliberately undereducated so that they can be a labour class - the economy there is tourism, and one of the only outlets that black males have traditionally been allowed is to play jazz music, y'know?
Christian Scott
#41. Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.
Christina Aguilera
#42. Like, I'm trying to make a statement that clean comedy is somehow better or loftier than dirty comedy, and I don't feel that way at all. I just think it's different. It's different. There's rock music, there's jazz music, there's reggae music: All of those forms are different.
Brian Regan
#43. I really love jazz, but I will never be a jazz musician as much as I dream. But, I think that the jazz music I love is there in my music.
Laura Mvula
#44. Deliverance is to the Bible what jazz music is to Mardi Gras: bold, brassy, and everywhere.
Max Lucado
#45. I'd love to see a Nirvana biopic. I loved them when I was younger. I really like jazz music, so I'd like to see a Billie Holiday biopic - she was a fascinating woman.
Antonia Thomas
#46. So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.
Miroslav Vitous
#47. There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2000 years from now when they study this civilization: The Constitution, Jazz music, and Baseball. These are the 3 most beautiful things this culture's ever created.
Gerald Early
#48. I like to say, jazz music is kind of like my musical equivalent of comfort food. You know, it's always where I go back to when I just want to feel sort of grounded.
Molly Ringwald
#49. 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
#50. This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human.
Matt Haig
#51. If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.
Ginger Baker
#52. Today Jazz music is performed & listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages & creeds.
Michelle Obama
#53. I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to listen to it.
Artie Shaw
#54. Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.
Jelly Roll Morton
#55. I think Christian spirituality is like jazz music. I think loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper. But it is no less real, no less meaningful, no less beautiful.
Donald Miller
#56. Jazz music hashaunted America for seventy years.It has tempted us out of our lily-white reserve with its black promise of untrammeled joy.
John Clellon Holmes
#57. If you met my dad, I think a lot of things would be put to rest. Because my pops is a pretty silly guy. But, Coldcut, they're based in the U.K. I'm a big fan of jazz music, so American music has had a big influence on what I listen to.
Eric San
#58. Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere!
Joe Lovano
#59. I started to play Jazz music in my early teens. A boyfriend brought records over, so I listened to everything
Marian McPartland
#60. Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.
David Sanborn
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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.
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#74. Jazz voices that unvanquishable, natural will toward creaativity and self-expression, depite everything, in the here and now.
Stephanie Mills
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. [Jazz singing] is like pornography. You can't say what it is, but you know it when you see it.
Kurt Elling
#80. I like rock music. I like jazz better, though.
Clarke Peters
#81. 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
#82. The kid come in at a strange angle, made the notes glitter like crystal.
Esi Edugyan
#83. Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence ...
Pat Metheny
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Both the nationalists and the communists disapproved of jazz and feared it. They thought it would weaken people's resolve to fight off the invasion. And most Americans know, China did ban all Western music for about 30 years, starting in 1949. This is where it started.
Nicole Mones
#87. Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.
Kamasi Washington
#88. It is Jazz's very nature to change, to develop & adapt to the circumstances of its environment.
Pat Metheny
#89. I never thought that the music called "jazz" was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic.
Miles Davis
#92. Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music.
Terry Teachout
#93. In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.
Charles Mingus
#94. My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something ... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.
Rokia Traore
#95. To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
Nina Simone
#97. 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
#98. I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.
Paul Desmond
#99. What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!
Pete La Roca
#100. The public, hearing pop music, is, without knowing it, also soaking up jazz.
Norman Granz
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