Jazz Quotes

Gospel music rhythms are not African in origin, although I know that's what the jazz experts say.

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

Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.

Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

Well, actually, I don't consider myself a jazz legend or anything.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

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.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

I actually find a lot of parallels in jazz and cartooning.

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

On the radio I listen to the easy-listening stations, the jazz stations.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

It's sort of what jazz would be if it stopped being snobby and what rock would be if it stopped being stupid.

Rock and roll mainly but I can play passable jazz also.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

I think jazz is good, but I don't enjoy it. It's not for me.

I never liked blues and I really didn't like jazz. I liked Chuck Berry.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to what?

I'm a great jazz fan.

If I'm going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.

Jazz was my first love.

When I'm in the classical world, I really treat it as exactly classical and I don't try and spruce it up or jazz it up or make it easier for the masses.

My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it.

I'm not a big jazz fan.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

The jazz boom was goin' on then so there was a lot happenin' in New York at that time.

I like to listen to classical music... I like mainline jazz.

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

I do find modern jazz quite tricky.

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.

I love Rihanna's new album, Skrillex, and Norah Jones. They're are all very different, but I love any rock, pop, and jazz.

I've been invited to do a trio with a fantastic jazz guitarist and a harmonica player.

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.

I wouldn't really say I'm a jazz guy, which I'm not.

I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.

Growing up, I listened to a lot of jazz and blues records - John Coltrane and Etta James. I was also really into Radiohead and the BeeGees.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

Then I took 8 years of French Horn, first jazz, and then classical.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

I recorded my first jazz record in the '70s.

I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

I wanted to make a jazz record. I didn't want it to be a standards record.

I've always loved jazz.

I've always wanted to record a jazz record. I did one in the '70s with Barbara Carroll. It's been a journey.

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

Possibly, I should have been a jazz singer from the beginning.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record.

That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

I wanted to play some more grown-up music - jazz.

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

You know what I'd really like to do? I'd like to record some white Chicago jazz.

I think Wes Montgomery is the greatest jazz guitarist that ever lived.

I got my love of jazz from my stepfather, who was a jazz musician.

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.

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

To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.

Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it's not a fad. It's up to us to see to it that it stays alive.