Jazz Quotes

It's true I've always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

Whenever society gets too stifling and the rules too complex, there's some sort of musical explosion.

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

If you don't know what it is, don't mess with it.

I don't need words. It's all in the phrasing.

When I hear the words jazz pianist, that just means I have the skills to do most things. Because to be a jazz pianist, even to be a bad jazz pianist, you have to be pretty good.

If one takes all the styles in jazz harmonically from the earliest beginnings to the latest experiments, he still has a rather limited scope when compared to the rest of music in the world.

If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!

I prefer music where melody, harmony and rhythm come together and no one element overshadows the other. Jazz at its best is a democracy of creativity.

Jazz is restless. It won't stay put & it never will.

I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

Up to the age of 14 I had not heard a note of anything before 1750, never heard a note of Bach, never heard anything after Wagner, and never heard any real jazz.

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

If you're a young artist, wondering what to call yourself, consider 'multimedia artist.' It's so vague. Then, no one can say, 'Hey, how come you're a jazz person, and you're making a pop opera?

When jazz is played in another nation, it is called American. When it is played in another country, it sounds false. Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I'll give it to them.

I don't think of myself as a jazz musician but a medicine man.

Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

Acting is like music and you improvise. It's like jazz, there's no rhyme or reason to it. It's not a plan. You practice to music and you just play it.

Somebody asked me once, 'Do you think that swing will ever come back?' And I said, 'Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?'

Don't be a perfectionist... leave that to the classical musicians.

Keith Moon is not interested in Jazz and won't ever be a Jazz drummer because he's more interested in looking good and being screamed at.

I learned jazz; that comes from blues. I learned rock; that comes from blues. I learned pop; that comes from blues. Even dance, that comes from blues, with the answer-and-response.

I still got my Ferrari.

Coltrane, you cant play everything at once!

I've been told that nobody sings the word 'hunger' like I do.

I never sing a song the same way twice.

Music is a gift and a burden I've had since I can remember who I was.

There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

Jazz is not gonna be a dinosaur and stay around in one form.

I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word 'jazz' means to them, and that's fine.

Since about 1980 Kenny Werner has been one of jazz’s unsung heroes

Jazz is like wine. When it is new it's only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it.

I like the music. I love it & live it in fact. But for me the business part of music just plain stinks.

I haven't a great Jazz band and I don't want one.

I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

It's not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.

For me, the ultimate form of expression is blues, where jazz appeals to me on an intellectual level.

When Lester plays, he almost seems to be singing; one can almost hear the words.

I did ballet, jazz and flamenco from when I was five years old. And my professional career started with dancing in musicals.

One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.

Being grown up is boring. Besides, I don't get jazz.