That Jazz Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. It's certainly no coincidence that big bands became the entertainment of the army in WWI and WWII, and that jazz drumming style is very military influenced. The snare drum comes from the military and becomes the core kind of sound of jazz drums.

Damien Chazelle

#4. I enjoy playing clubs. I still enjoy the closeness of the nightclub venue. However, after a certain period of time and after playing around some of the clubs in New YorkI felt that jazz should be presented in a more prestigious atmosphere.

Sonny Rollins

#5. Yeah, equal pay for equal work and our bodies ourselves and Gloria Steinem and all that jazz ... but in that dusty dark little corner of every woman's heart where we keep our maps of Tierra del Fuego lives the hunger to fetch a powerful man his slippers on her hands and knees.

Tiffany Reisz

#6. In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

Herbie Hancock

#7. Ed gives him a dirty look. Leo grins. Dylan twitches. It feels like something's going on, I think loudly, and I know that Jazz hears my thought because she gives me her serious look and blows a chewing-gum bubble in my direction.

Cath Crowley

#8. What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

Dexter Gordon

#9. I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people.

Terry Teachout

#10. I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.

Sonny Rollins

#11. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul and all that jazz.

Leah Raeder

#12. What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

Gerry Mulligan

#13. Actors have to make you believe that it's happening for the first time and all that jazz and make it human and at the same time entertain you.

Tom Sizemore

#14. Apollo's lips spread into a smile. "Sorry. I'll try to come after dinner next time." The bowl disappeared from his hands, and I wondered where it went. "Well, it's good to see the Scooby gang all in one piece. Warms my heart and all that jazz, but let's get to the point.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#15. They say that Jazz is back, and I don't think it's gone anywhere. But they say it's back.

Art Blakey

#16. I like to pretend that I'm covering my tracks, bracing for any contingency. Ready for the worst, and all that jazz. I always feel better if there's a plan in place. And in this case, the plan was, Leave the blind guy in charge of the juvenile delinquents and everything will be just fine. Probably.

Cherie Priest

#17. Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind.

Mary Lou Williams

#18. I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

Ken Burns

#19. I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

Branford Marsalis

#20. The Democrat Party today is not enamored of Bill Clinton. They may not even be enamored of Hillary [Clinton]. But the things that jazzed Democrats back in the nineties are nowhere near the things that jazz the Democrats of today.

Rush Limbaugh

#21. Sure, I could have lots of people who do the cooking, the driving, all that jazz - but I would be unhappy. I wouldn't want my children raised that way.

Kate Winslet

#22. Don't believe that jazz about there's nothing you can do, "turn on and drop out, man" - because you've got to turn on and drop in, or they're going to drop all over you.

John Lennon

#23. The cool thing is that jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit. Because in jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best, we're non-judgmental.

Herbie Hancock

#24. I don't believe that jazz will ever really die. It's a nice way to express yourself.

Chet Baker

#25. It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.

Branford Marsalis

#26. There is a view that jazz is 'evil' because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work. They knew how to punch through music that would cure and make people feel good.

Garth Hudson

#27. Free music is in a constant state of surprise and, consequently, presents no surprise at all. So, I'm not really a fan of Free music. Having said that, Jazz is based on individual expression and I'm compelled to respect the Free player's option to express himself as he chooses.

Pete La Roca

#28. No worries, I won't force you to marry me. I'll get over you. There are plenty of fish in the sea and all that jazz. - Elora

Quinn Loftis

#29. I did get to sing at Carnegie Hall when they were made Landmarks! I sang ALL THAT JAZZ with the NY Pops ... what a total thrill.

Karen Mason

#30. I would say that jazz is my own language.

Amy Winehouse

#31. 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

#32. I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully.

Andre Previn

#33. They always say that jazz doesn't sell, but it's a lie, because it does sell, and it sells consistently year in and year out.

Lester Bowie

#34. I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last.

David Amram

#35. I never gave up on that idea, you know, that jazz musicians have the same opportunity as everybody else and that it's what you put on that record that makes the difference whether you sell it or not or are able to get it into people's households.

George Benson

#36. When I have to compete with John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Louie Armstrong on iTunes, which I'm doing now, that's a problem. That means that jazz is not being heard by younger audiences.

Robert Glasper

#37. I'd love to give my girls a traditional Thanksgiving with turkey and all that jazz, but we've raised them to love Tuscan food so much that they don't care for it. My favorite is a nice polenta with beef stew and broccoli rabe on the side.

Debi Mazar

#38. It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

Rita Coolidge

#39. It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing.

Pat Metheny

#40. It's something that - jazz is one of the few things that you can go and listen to, I don't care where you're from, what you are, what background you come from - there's something there for you.

Billy Higgins

#41. I especially like Duke Ellington jazz, which is a little more ... I lived in New York for a while. I lived in Harlem for a bit, and I just fell in love with the idea of that era of New York, that jazz era, especially jazz in Harlem.

Charlie Day

#42. People are already worrying about the ball moving around and all that jazz.

Mahela Jayawardene

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

Jack O'Brien

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. Jazz was a bomb. That was also the low point of Mac sales. People had just written it off.

Mitch Kapor

#52. That's the beautiful thing about the saxophone. It can peacefully coexist with just about anything - whether it's hip-hop, rap, rock music, pop, R&B or jazz, there's a place for the saxophone in all of those styles.

Dave Koz

#53. There were a lot of R&B groups that were my heroes, but the funny thing about my career and the way it went and where it went, at first I didn't really want to do pop music. I was a little bit more into jazz and R&B.

Frankie Valli

#54. How can music without any words make you think? I listen to jazz when I'm doing something else. I use it for background music, I don't just sit down and concentrate on it. Lyrics, words - that's what makes me think.

Eddie Murphy

#55. Robert Altman made that movie Kansas City about the jazz scene in the city, and we saw that band all together, and that was an amazing show. That's what I got into. I like jazz.

Nick Kroll

#56. I think that's what I love about jazz is that you can do what you want, and you're allowed to mess up.

Rebecca Ferguson

#57. I don't really get the same kinda romance that I would get from, like, jazz. And even to a lesser extent to rock 'n roll. Rock 'n roll has a romance to it - how can I put it? A very vulgar romance, but still a romance; whereas hip hop has more facade.

Lupe Fiasco

#58. Footballers can be like artists when the mind and body are working as one. It is what Miles Davis does when he plays free jazz - everything pulls together into one intense moment that is beautiful.

Lilian Thuram

#59. The jazz chord substitutions in a country song ... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.

Brian Setzer

#60. That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.

Branford Marsalis

#61. When I'd hear something that sounded like I could follow it - most of those big band jazz tunes are blues anyway - I would hum it and play with the fiddle while I was humming.

Johnny Gimble

#62. Looking deeper, I see not subjugation, but a tool of power to control my fate in the world of man that symbolizes my ownership over both my nature spirit and wolf-self.

Jazz Feylynn

#63. The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Ken Burns

#64. One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.

Mahalia Jackson

#65. 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

#66. When someone says "don't freak," wouldn't a person think that maybe they should freak?

Jazz Feylynn

#67. A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.

Charlie Trotter

#68. I always say that the problem with jazz accessibility is not the content of the music, it's people's ability to access it.

Esperanza Spalding

#69. What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

Ray Charles

#70. I came upon Diana Krall's jazz arrangement of "A Case of You" several years back. I've always wanted to pay homage to both her version and Joni's, and by proxy, my mom. She's the one that introduced me to that music.

Cheyenne Jackson

#71. I always tell my students when you're going to be a jazz musician the first thing you've got to do is be a professional musician, and that means you have to feed yourself with the instrument.

Lester Bowie

#72. Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.

Rachel Bloom

#73. I'm reserved, so I've always needed to find a way of opening up. Jazz helped me do that.

Renee Fleming

#74. There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.

Robert Glasper

#75. I have very eclectic taste in music. I like everything from Nirvana, which is featured in the film, to world music, to orchestral and jazz. For me, the nineties were about Oasis, because I was travelling around Britain when that band exploded onto the music scene.

Isla Fisher

#76. I fear that I won't get better and that I won't have time to practice. To be called a "jazz musician" - it's a big responsibility.

Esperanza Spalding

#77. There's a certain phraseology involved in jazz, and I've moved away from that.

Jan Garbarek

#78. I've done two albums for Concord Records; one was with Al Jarreau and it did very well for us. The second album was called 'Songs And Stories,' and it had good songs and good performances, but I promised them I would do an album that was more jazz-oriented.

George Benson

#79. Well first of all, I'm a singer. I sing since I talk. So the great ballad singers, the people that sang with so much feeling, jazz, blues, all those singers, they were songs that I listened to, records that my mom played for me, and then later I bought.

Gloria Estefan

#80. I'm a big fan of gospel music, and you cannot be a fan of rock and roll, you cannot be a fan of country western music, and you can't really be a fan of jazz without listening to a lot of music that's religious.

Penn Jillette

#81. I'd love to act. I feel that it's another naked, mysterious challenge, like jazz. It kind of intrigues me in the same way.

Paula Cole

#82. His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz
everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom ...

Evelyn Waugh

#83. I closed my own jazz bar so I could be a man who can write novels as I like. I was pleased about that. This pleasure was connected to the pleasure of writing.

Haruki Murakami

#84. Sometimes when I do a joke and it doesn't get a lot of laughs, it kind of feels like I'm doing jazz. That's kinda cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks ... Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.

Mike Birbiglia

#85. inquiries. You will feel it in the music and cherish it as the most magical part of the jazz idiom. If you don't, you can always leave the jazz club and check out a rock or pop covers band. That's perfect entertainment for people who want to live in the realm of perfect replication. Jazz, in

Ted Gioia

#86. I love things that are very broad. I love alternative, rock, hip hop, rap, and I'll go to classical or jazz.

Corbin Bleu

#87. I play classical music almost exclusively. I never mastered jazz or gospel in the way that my mother did. She was a fine improvisational musician. I pretty much have to stick to what's written on the page.

Condoleezza Rice

#88. Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play.

Ahmad Jamal

#89. 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

#90. A lot of jazz is like that; it sells over a period of time.

Lester Bowie

#91. Jazz has an audience all around the globe and has had for many decades, I think speaking of the United States, let's say that what we need is more of an official recognition.

Sonny Rollins

#92. Well, jazz is to me, a complete lifestyle. It's bigger than a word. It's a much bigger force than just something that you can say. It's something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

Ray Brown

#93. I will say, too, that lovemaking, if sincere, is one of the best ideas Satan put in the apple she gave to the serpent to give to Eve. The best idea in that apple, though, is making jazz.

Kurt Vonnegut

#94. In jazz improv, there is no such thing as wrong notes, only notes that are better chosen and it's not about the note you play, it's about the note you play next.

Larry Carlton

#95. I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats.

Paul Bley

#96. You can't write music right unless you know how the man that'll play it plays poker.

Duke Ellington

#97. I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

Jonathan Frakes

#98. Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.

Andy Richter

#99. I actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that.

Douglas Booth

#100. I remember when one dressed the part for the West End, and strolled with yellow gloves and a walking-stick. But that world has gone, and another takes its place, eyes see differently, emotions react to other themes. Men weep at jazz, and violence has become sexual. Time marches on.

Charlie Chaplin