Jazz Quotes

I just got to hear every note. After I left Birdland, I started working at the Jazz Gallery. In the end, I still couldn't play, but I knew how to listen. I was probably the world's best listener.

My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it.

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

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.

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.

Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

I think I represent a more left-wing view of what jazz is.

I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.

Jazz took too much discipline. You have to come in at the right place, which is different than me singing the blues, where I can sing, 'Oh, baby,' if there's a pause in the melody. With jazz, you better leave that space open, or put in something real cool.

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

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

Then I took 8 years of French Horn, first jazz, and then classical.

And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.

I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he's playing Jazz whether I like it or not.

Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising.

And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

I don't want to sound as if I'm doing something tremendously special. But I am a jazz fan.

Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.

I couldn't get my album played over the so-called smooth jazz stations. Jazz stations would not play it. You don't always know who you're making that soul connection with.

You're not going to hear me do a rap song, you're not going to hear me do a jazz song. We have to be true to our roots, do what we do, and try to do it a little better each time.

I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

I think jazz is good, but I don't enjoy it. It's not for me.

I have a bachelor's and a master's in jazz.