Top 100 Quotes About Jazz
#1. Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.
Sid Caesar
#2. There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.
Alice Walker
#3. I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back.
Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Donald Miller
#4. Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital
In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning.
Selfishness is like listening to good jazz
With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.
Philip Larkin
#5. I thought I was actually doing quite well - I was on Jazz FM six days a week. I fancied going to Australia and I had a wonderful experience. It's changed me for the better and it was flattering to win.
Tony Blackburn
#7. My style of singing is very much Latin jazz meets Latin and a little bit of rhythm and blues. When I do ballads, my fans love it. They want to listen to my classics. They want to party.
La India
#8. When you're talking about your own music every day, listening to bands, going to festivals, you can kind of lose sight of your initial connection with music. Instrumental music - especially jazz - helps me refocus.
Jenny Lewis
#9. In fact, jazz has such a great feeling and great emotional content that it really doesn't require you to have technical understanding of it. I think you just have to allow your feelings to go with the music and you will find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.
Dave Holland
#10. So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.
Miroslav Vitous
#11. 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
#12. I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.
Walter Becker
#13. My first guitar, a Fender Jazz Master, I traded it in for a Les Paul Deluxe.
Lenny Kravitz
#14. My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer.
Jan Hammer
#15. So, you know, there are a lot of the biggest records of the year. There's great music in hip-hop and jazz and, you know, and folk music.
Stephen W. Thompson
#16. As my career has progressed, I've had the pleasure of playing with the baddest jazz cats on the planet. But that doesn't change my desire to entertain folks. That's really who I am.
George Benson
#17. Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.
Steve Lacy
#18. I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.
Carla Bley
#19. Mum says be careful of boys who never take anything seriously. Dad says a boy needs a good sense of humor to get through his love life. Jazz says my dad must need a sense of humor to get through his love life if he's living in the shed
Cath Crowley
#20. Our intention is to not only attract the hardcore jazz fan, but we're doing it in such a way that it will also be easy to take for those who are not necessarily steeped in the ways of jazz.
Ramsey Lewis
#21. This was jazz music. It was full of the complexity and contradictions that I would soon learn made humans human.
Matt Haig
#22. In the last few years I've been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there.
Serj Tankian
#23. I like the idea of an eclectic approach, incorporating jazz with other forms and other genres of music.
Herbie Hancock
#24. 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
#25. When I was a little kid I thought I would grow up to be black and sing jazz in nightclubs.
Molly Ringwald
#26. Gospel music rhythms are not African in origin, although I know that's what the jazz experts say.
Mahalia Jackson
#27. 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
#28. My parents have always been open to me trying new things, whether it's yoga or ballet or tap or jazz or piano or horse riding.
Sofia Vassilieva
#30. I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It's all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.
Jessye Norman
#31. It suddenly occurred to me that true believers in hard-driving jazz - Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor - could never become owners of cleaning shops in malls across from railroad stations.
Haruki Murakami
#32. From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South's great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll, as well as the Caribbean-inspired foodways today enshrined in Southern-style barbeque joints from Miami to Anchorage.
Colin Woodard
#33. 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
#34. In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out.
Terry Teachout
#35. In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.
Wynton Marsalis
#36. What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.
Kurt Vonnegut
#37. Since about 1980 Kenny Werner has been one of jazz's unsung heroes
Harvey Pekar
#38. If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.
Ginger Baker
#39. Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.
Bill Evans
#40. Cicadas, buckling and unbuckling their stomach muscles, yield the sound of someone sharpening scissors. Fall field crickets, the thermometer hounds, add high-pitched tinkling chirps to the jazz, and their call quickens with warm weather, slows again with cool.
Diane Ackerman
#41. American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.
Ben Dreyfuss
#42. I'm a dancer, so I do four hours of dance a week of ballet, jazz, hip hop, contemporary. I also play the piano and I just started learning the guitar.
Ryan Newman
#43. The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.
Van Morrison
#44. 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
#45. Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.
Tony Wilson
#46. Between Prince and my dad's fusion-jazz records, I didn't have a choice in being funky.
Patrick Stump
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. He defined the state as being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.
Steven Kotler
#50. You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.
Louis Armstrong
#51. Barney Kessel was 'Mr. Guitar,' the foremost jazz guitarist of his generation. He had an amazing imagination, his solos were incredible, he swung his tail off, he was a heck of an arranger and could out-read anybody ...
Larry Coryell
#52. You can't teach it [jazz singing]. There's nobody who can teach you how to sing jazz. Either you know how to sing jazz, or you don't.
Tony Bennett
#53. Today Jazz music is performed & listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages & creeds.
Michelle Obama
#54. When I hear the words jazz pianist, that just means I have the skills to do most things. Because to be a jazz pianist, even to be a bad jazz pianist, you have to be pretty good.
Robert Glasper
#55. What I see for the band by the end of this year is the Complex live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. I want my guys to be comfortable. I'm certainly not in this for the money, but I'd really like to see my guys make some money off of this stuff.
Jimmy Chamberlin
#56. I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.
Steve Lacy
#57. Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.
Martin Scorsese
#58. I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.
Lynn Swann
#59. 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
#60. Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).
Michael Snow
#61. We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.
Carly Simon
#62. As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.
Edgar Winter
#64. To my ears, jazz sounds better in warm weather and after the sun has gone down. While I will listen to some of my favorite jazz records in cooler weather, it's the warmer nights that really make them come alive. Something about those sounds and the heat of the night really makes it happen for me.
Henry Rollins
#65. All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.
Terry Teachout
#66. 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
#67. Whenever I'm in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here - like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things - but I couldn't do what they did. They were too good.
B.B. King
#68. I didn't really like jazz that much and was unhappy in that genre. It was what I was doing just to get by and pay rent.
Yukimi Nagano
#69. There are wonderful things in Jazz, the improvisation, the liveliness, the being at one with the audience.
Henri Matisse
#70. I have discovered three things which know no geographical borders - classical music, American jazz, and applause as the sign of the public's favor.
Jascha Heifetz
#71. People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.
Alan Lomax
#72. Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.
Jack Kerouac
#73. I know jazz is completely un-American. But the reason why America doesn't like it is because it's not funny. We [americans] have made jazz funny.
Paul Provenza
#74. 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
#75. You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.
Art Blakey
#76. I never liked blues and I really didn't like jazz. I liked Chuck Berry.
Johnny Ramone
#77. From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.
Bill Frist
#78. The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.
Billy Joel
#79. The only time I've ever really felt envy is when I've watched people make music, which made my time living in the now-legendary Jazz Loft at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York a constant source of agony and ecstasy!
Harold Feinstein
#80. In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about.
David Amram
#81. Anyone who's just driven 90 yards against huge men trying to kill them has earned the right to do Jazz hands.
Craig Ferguson
#82. It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.
Isadora Duncan
#83. If I had to look at 'Now He Sings' ... from outside myself, I see it as a natural part of the growth of the jazz culture, which I've always been so happy - honored, really - to be a small part of.
Chick Corea
#84. I have specific playlists for arrivals in different cities. Tokyo skews new wave, Paris more jazz, and New York is Top 40.
Chris Benz
#85. The people in Japan know more about the history of jazz and the musicians than the people in the United States do.
Billy Higgins
#86. Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.
Jan Garbarek
#87. Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.
Bill Griffith
#88. I like jazz, rock n' roll, some hip hop - I can't think of any music I don't like.
B.B. King
#89. My husband makes fun of me, because I know I can use strong prose to jazz-hand my way through plot that isn't as interesting as I'd like it to be.
Kelly Sue DeConnick
#90. When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.
Flea
#92. Jazz changes and all. But I don't know the names of what it is I'm doing.
Stevie Ray Vaughan
#93. Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.
Barbara Januszkiewicz
#94. We didn't go for music that sounded like blues, or jazz, or rock, or Led Zeppelin, or Rolling Stones. We didn't want to be like any of the other bands.
Michael Giles
#95. I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.
Matthew Shipp
#96. 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
#97. Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere!
Joe Lovano
#98. I started to play Jazz music in my early teens. A boyfriend brought records over, so I listened to everything
Marian McPartland
#99. Lately, I've been listening to some jazz albums. I love the new Pat Metheny album. John Coltrane. I still like good metal, though!
Geezer Butler
#100. Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz.
Jon Pareles
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