Jazz Quotes

We can all be grateful that there is a place like (University of) North Texas! North Texas has been unique among schools in the country that offer jazz studies . . . quality!

Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

I went to North Texas State, one of the great jazz schools. When I realized I wasn't going to be Miles Davis, I switched my major to English and theater.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

My mother would take me to jazz concerts in the park and everybody was smoked out. She gave me the intro and then she forced me to play an instrument to keep me out of trouble.

I've never listened to jazz. It's just not something I ever paid attention to.

The human being receives the pleasure from music, not from the argument over what it is.

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.

My personal trainer is an ex-dancer so we do a lot of ballet and jazz.

Dabbling in music and being in music when I was young I had my own view of what I thought music was whether it was jazz, r&b, or hip hop.

When I discovered Mose Allison I felt I had discovered the missing link between jazz and blues

I'm reserved, so I've always needed to find a way of opening up. Jazz helped me do that.

I would also like to mention pianists like Michel Petrucciani or Chick Сorea for whom I have great admiration in the jazz field.

I wanted to play some more grown-up music - jazz.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

I wanted to make a jazz record. I didn't want it to be a standards record.

I've always loved jazz.

I recorded my first jazz record in the '70s.

Possibly, I should have been a jazz singer from the beginning.

I was never that big a rock-and-roll, rock guy. I really preferred jazz, you know, that kind of thing.

I think we're an inspiration to young people, to know they can be honest and not run away from influences that are not jazz. We're definitely breeding a new wave of jazz, for real.

That's a skill that I'm proud of: to be able to be a jazz musician and go a bit crazy sometimes and other times be able to pull it all in and lay it down like a track.

I do feel a responsibility because most people like me that are my age or younger, they don't quite make it over to the jazz side. They flirt with it, but they don't quite marry it.

Everybody's not going to like jazz, let's just be honest about it. Everybody doesn't like everything. There's a disconnect in generations and some people just aren't going to feel that music.

I can't imagine my life without the extraordinary bebop jazz revolution in New York in late '40s and '50s.

I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock 'n' roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.

You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.

You must own it to play it.

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

I am comfortable with anything I sing: jazz, gospel, classical. It doesn't matter. I can do it all.

When I'm in the classical world, I really treat it as exactly classical and I don't try and spruce it up or jazz it up or make it easier for the masses.

You know the rules. No jazz before a rumble.

I am a complete jazz nerd.

I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre.

The law don't like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

In the last few years I've been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there.

I hate the bloody highways. I hate hamburgers, I hate Greyhound buses. I'd have liked to have been in America during the Jazz Age, or the Golden Age of Hollywood.

I did jazz dance for a few years.

Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.

If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician.

Life is like a great jazz riff. You sense the end the very moment you were wanting it to go on forever.

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.

I feel that I have an obligation to jazz and also to myself to play as good as I can play.

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

What happens when an art form becomes ambiguous, I think, is that the standards are lowered. You can say anything is jazz. So I think it's important to reflect on what made jazz so special.

I think when you look back at the different eras in jazz, what leads from one to another is never a melodic revolution, but a rhythmic revolution.

Jazz voices that unvanquishable, natural will toward creaativity and self-expression, depite everything, in the here and now.

Growing up playing jazz and improvising has had a big impact on me, and it translates into my music.