Jazz Music Quotes

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.

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.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

Playing the sax and then enjoying jazz music man. It's like I learned how to find words inside of the beat.

I know I’m an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I’m not a jazz musician. I’m not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It’s in between these areas.

There are a lot of things I'm proud of, but the proudest have yet to come.

I loved music from the age of eight. Jazz and blues. But also Little Richard and Elvis Presley.

For me, the main thing is spontaneity & taking chances.

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can't not be a musician.

Jazz to me is a living music.

There are a million good tunes.

I started to play Jazz music in my early teens. A boyfriend brought records over, so I listened to everything

Today Jazz music is performed & listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages & creeds.

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.

Music was not a big deal to me when I was in middle school. And then I slowly became a big jazz fan. Even more than concerts, a lot of my high school time was spent going to jazz clubs in the city.

I don't know if the music moves forward anymore. I haven't heard anything for years - except refinement - coming out of the jazz world.

I'm interested in music, not in my image. If someone plays something fantastic, that I could never have thought of, it makes me happy to know it exists.

You must own it to play it.

Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.

I listen to everything, I listen to all artists that come along.

I'm fortunate that I'm making a living at it now because I'm not equipped to do anything else.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

He has only heard what I felt.

Art and disease proliferate via contagion, and similar conditions favor both.

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.

Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.

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

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.

I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards – Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin.

Man, if you have to ask what it [jazz] is, you’ll never know.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

When stealing from other players, an older musician wisely advised me, choose a different instrument from your own, and people won’t notice the theft.

Jazz is the only lever used by all the riffraff of Tram 83 to switch social class as one would subway cars.

If it sounds good, it is good.

It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.

Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

In Jazz, like in America, the group works together toward a common cause with lots of room left for each individual to shine.

They call it music, but it's just this side of magic.