Jazz Quotes

I'm talking about noise rock. I don't think that noise rock element belongs in jazz. It's not for me anyway; it just doesn't fit.

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation.

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

Ninety-five percent of my audience was white.

The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere!

Scott Feiner is a soulful magnet for the fusion of Brazilian and jazz music.

Pain can be washed out with a song. / Pain can become jazz digested and transformed.

My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.

We're here to have a ball.

I love jazz because it's so American; you know it's our Only Original Art Form. It just goes against the greed of corporate America and the Wall Street Banks that are destroying our economy.

If it wasn't for hustlers, gangsters & gamblers there'd be no Jazz. Wasn't middle~class who said Let's go hear Bird tonight.

Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.

I listen to Neil Young and jazz and classical stations and, if my girlfriend's driving, it tends to be Hall & Oates.

I have a lot of albums yet to do.

I'm always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice.

You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it.

I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people.

I think when you love music, you love a lot of it. Now when it comes to jazz, it's very much in the hyperions of height. You go exploring every night.

[Jazz] is a music of freedom and wonder. It's our indigenous art form, and I'm still blessed to travel around the world and people lay out the carpet for us, so it's quite touching.

Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

Phil Robson is a disturbingly good jazz guitar player!

The chief trouble with jazz is that there is not enough of it; some of it we have to listen to twice.

Krupa's drums went through us like a triple bourbon.

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels.

Every day when I sit down to play, I learn something new.

Jazz is the music of unemployment.

I'd rather play jazz, I hate rock and roll.

Jazz to me is the spirit of freedom. I mean real freedom. Freedom to explore. Freedom to express. Freedom to pour out your guts.

I feel a lot more secure about the directions I take, than I might have, had I not practiced Buddhism.

I started to listen to Japanese jazz musicians when I went to high school. Some people I listened to were Yosuke Yamashita, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sadao Watanabe.

Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.

Yes, I have been studying piano since I was six. Classical, jazz, compositional, Broadway, everything. I just love it all.

Jazz isn't as profitable for labels like Hip hop or Rap. Jazz needs subsidies to continue, just like European classical works of Bach and Beethoven are subsidized.

I find as much inspiration from the forerunners of jazz as I do the modern-day innovators of jazz.

I would sit in at a jazz brunch [at sweet Basil] with Eddie Chamblee, who was a great tenor player. Really a kind man. The whole band was great.

Trouble follows me wherever I go. Thing I'm in is just a sack o'woe.

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.

Steve Marcus was one of the greatest saxophonists in all of music. He truly was able to unite jazz with the popular music of the time.

I always tell my students when you're going to be a jazz musician the first thing you've got to do is be a professional musician, and that means you have to feed yourself with the instrument.

My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.

Around middle school I studied jazz guitar and ended up playing in a jazz band for a bit. But, after high school, I haven't even touched a guitar.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

I was pretty much prepared because I was already playing in extremely good ways when I arrived from Europe because I played jazz four or five years before I arrived here.

Jazz is part folk art, part progressive art.

Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.

I would not describe myself as an avid jazz fan and I am not a jazz musician myself. However, that is not to say that jazz does not play a vital and important role in my life.

I write pop songs. But I think it is sprinkled with a lot of counter-culture references. It ranged from rap to hip hop to trip hop, house, drum and bass, and experimental and improv and jazz.