Jazz Quotes

Any live venue where there is alcohol served and it's past midnight there is gonna be fights. It doesn't matter if it's Hip-Hop, Rock or Jazz.

Jazz is a beautiful woman whose older brother is a policeman.

Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.

We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.

I don't understand the music but I certainly understand the girl singer!

My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!

Jazz is one of the few things you can do in society and express yourself freely and creatively.

Jazz was home. It created a hunger within me.

Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.

Jazz is something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

Romanticism implies nostalgia for damaged goods.

I guess I learnt to appreciate old Hindi-movie music from my dad and somewhere down the line picked up jazz as well.

I listen to and I play all kinds of music, and I'm interested in jazz and in bluegrass - I like it all - but Cuban music speaks to me in a certain way.

I'm a person of change and I must be honest to my artistry and my creativity. That's part of the word 'jazz'... it's an adventure.

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.

Diana Krall knocks me out. I like jazz and I like her simple approach.

Jazz is like a great blues band that fell down the stairs

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

Music should never be harmless.

Bop is no love-child of jazz.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

Do you think Duke Ellington didn't listen to Debussy? Louis Armstrong loved opera, did you know that? Name me a jazz pianist who wasn't influenced by European music!

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

I think when I feel I'm at my best is when I'm on stage, and it's my version of jazz because it's just riffing or something.

We're working as if it were going out of style-which of course it is.

I'm not really married to the craft of jazz - I'm married to me, and my style, and whatever I produce.

I'm sure there are people who say like, "I was wearing weird emo eyeliner," but there's something pretty embarrassing about the jazz phase.

If you don't like Louis Armstrong, you don't know how to love.

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.

What separates great jazz musicians from average ones is Taste. Those who have taste consistently choose notes, tempos, timbres and voicings that seduce and satisfy attentive listeners.

Ted Lewis could make the clarinet talk. What it said was put me back in the case!

Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor.

Miles'd got killed if he hit me.

"Cannonball Adderley said, 'First 20 minutes we'll jazz out, then the last hour it's gonna be songs that people paid to see.' Which is why he was driving a Rolls-Royce."

When rock music came in, I wasn't bitter about it. I was puzzled.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

Every conversation is a form of Jazz. The activity of instantaneous creation is as ordinary to us as breathing.

I'm basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I'm good. I think I'm a very poor piano player.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

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

The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.

When I was a little kid I thought I would grow up to be black and sing jazz in nightclubs.

He would forget everybody's name, so everybody was called 'Pops'.

I was blessed to work with The Jazz Messengers when the two piano players were Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

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

In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I’m very much a jazz poet.

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

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere.

From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.