Jazz Quotes

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

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.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

Music is an addiction.

Fusion has been my nemesis.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

I love more percussions more than anything. I always wanted to be a drummer.

Jazz stands for freedom.

Miles'd got killed if he hit me.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars.

You will never know what the meaning of Jazz is if ask what it means.

I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.

My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to be raunchy.

People are already worrying about the ball moving around and all that jazz.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

Let the music speak for itself.

I like everything, jazz and classical, and all over the spectrum.

Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me.

the French write plays and paint as naturally as we play jazz - it's just a national gift.

What I like is not a particular genre, it's storytelling. There's a lot of great storytelling in jazz, and in folk and in country music.

It's always Jazz. You can put a new dress on her, a new hat, but no matter what kind of clothes she's the same old broad.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties.

I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.

It's not jazz as we know jazz here in America.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.

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

What I wanted to do was music, until I was about 16. But it was jazz and rock, never classical music.

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

In order to play jazz, you have to be able to play the blues.

As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty.

I'd like to play for you one of my compositions, my only composition.

You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.

I think the challenges for me was to go into the studio with these incredible jazz players and come up to their level of excellence. That's always a challenge.

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

Shut up and let me see your jazz hands.

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.

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.