Jazz Quotes

Jazz Quote of the day

Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music.

Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.

Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking.

Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once.

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

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.

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

Each man has his own music bubbling up inside him.

Jazz is freedom. You think about that.

Well, I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gonna keep playin'

Jazz is my adventure. I'm after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That's it. Just using notes differently.

Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

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

Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it's a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don't listen.

The worst crime is faking it.

Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn't play like Wynton.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

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

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That's why I wanted the clarinet.

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

To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!

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.

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

Don t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.

I like jazz, but I could never play it. You just sit there with a guitar the size of a Chevy on your chest, wearing a stupid hat, playing the same solo for an hour.

Some kids in Italy call me 'Mama Jazz; I thought that was so cute. As long as they don't call me 'Grandma Jazz.'

The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.

I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

A genius is the one most like himself.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.

The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition.

There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.