That Jazz Quotes

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

Jack O'Brien

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Mitch Kapor

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Branford Marsalis

#21. 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

#22. 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

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

Ken Burns

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

Mahalia Jackson

#25. 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

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

Jazz Feylynn

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

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

Renee Fleming

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

Robert Glasper

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Jan Garbarek

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

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

Corbin Bleu

#49. 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

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

Ahmad Jamal

#51. 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

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

Lester Bowie

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

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

Duke Ellington

#59. 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

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

Andy Richter

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. I want to make hip-hop that can use guitars and soul and jazz and just fuse it all together. And I want to make this whole new sound that's going to shock the world. Unfortunately, the masses didn't receive it.

Will Ferrell

#64. I love the sounds of Latin jazz, R&B, hip-hop, alternative, all that stuff. I'm a radio kid.

Mario Vazquez

#65. I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

Adrian Mitchell

#66. Because it has such a ragged movement. It suggests something like that.

Scott Joplin

#67. My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

Ishmael Reed

#68. What I love about jazz is that it's full of legends, full of myths. It's an oral history because it started in New Orleans and Kansas City, under the radar.

Damien Chazelle

#69. To me, jazz is the closest thing to insanity that there is in music.

David

#70. Sometimes there are no gigs, but the main thing is the music. You can't take that away. The only person who can take that away from you is you.

Mike Stern

#71. We created the spirituals. We created so much great music, jazz chief amongst our innovations, teaching us how to prize ourselves and how to speak to one another, that our kids don't know that achievement, there's no way in the world that could be good for us.

Wynton Marsalis

#72. After me there are no more jazz singers ... It's a crime that no little singer is back there sockin' it to me in my field. To keep it going, to keep it alive, because I'm not going to live forever.

Betty Carter

#73. There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched.

Damien Chazelle

#74. I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.

Molly Ringwald

#75. I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music - all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

Robert Glasper

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

Amy Winehouse

#77. The jazz rhythm won't be understood by the bulk of my audience. That's the problem. We can get away with maybe one tune a night. It depends on where we place it. A song like 'Beyond the Sea,' the fans love that. It's fresh.

George Benson

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

Sonny Rollins

#79. And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.

Wynton Marsalis

#80. 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

#81. But the reasons against going to New Orleans
that spicy southern city known for jazz and Mardi Gras and hospitality
were the very reasons we had to go.

Howard Schultz

#82. 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

#83. My brother had a big band in high school; after that we continued to play together, eventually forming a group called the Jazz Brothers, that recorded for Riverside Records.

Chuck Mangione

#84. What happens when an art form becomes ambiguous, I think, is that the standards are lowered. You can say anything is jazz. So I think it's important to reflect on what made jazz so special.

Stefon Harris

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I'd buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful!

Tom Verlaine

#88. I did an instrumental jazz album. That was my first album.

Tom Curren

#89. When I sang that song, I felt it was almost as if some force had moved into my body. Things like that have only happened to me singing jazz. It doesn't happen when singing pop. I get so deeply into the music, it feels like I've become someone else.

Rita Coolidge

#90. In the century of jazz we are likely to overlook the emergence of the waltz as a hot and explosive human expression that broke through the formal feudal barriers of courtly and choral dance styles.

Marshall McLuhan

#91. Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz. If someone drops a note, someone else must step into the vacuum and drive the beat that sustains the team.

Phil Jackson

#92. Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

Yo-Yo Ma

#93. Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

Lee Konitz

#94. New Age is a very small box. It was a term that was brought in by the music industry to classify music that is neither jazz, classical, pop or rock. They didn't know what to call it or what to do with it. So they threw it all together under this one name.

Yanni

#95. When I was very young, there was a lot of music at home, mostly jazz. I was walking around singing and pretending I was in bands from a very young age. But the first song that was really personal to me was 'Blue Suede Shoes'.

Nile Rodgers

#96. Classical wasn't my only interest in those days. Potsdam was the place where I fell in love with jazz, a love that, for a while at least, I thought would be my life.

Renee Fleming

#97. I ... started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that's just the way it came out.

Nat King Cole

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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