Jazz Quotes

I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock-n-roll with jazz, and I thought I could make some money playing music.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

I have been steadily exchanging a rock audience who were nervous about what they had just bought for a jazz audience who not only were happy with their purchase, but are increasingly coming again.

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

Certainly one of the more common experiences in the jazz field is discovering someone new. Improvising musicians are capable of being musical travelers, voyagers. We want to join in on whatever we hear. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

The French - they like jazz, they've been on jazz a long time.

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

I wasn't a trained Mickey Mouse club performer. I played in jazz clubs and restaurants.

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

I enjoy playing clubs. I still enjoy the closeness of the nightclub venue. However, after a certain period of time and after playing around some of the clubs in New YorkI felt that jazz should be presented in a more prestigious atmosphere.

I would love to make a real jazz album someday because I never have. But that's something I'm not in a rush to do.

Clifford Brown was in the jazz circles considered to be probably the greatest trumpet player who ever lived.

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

The blues and jazz will live forever... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.

Many jazz artists go to L.A. seeking a more comfortable life and then they really stop playing.

In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

I'm concerned with trend. I don't know where jazz fans will come from 20 years from now.

I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.

I think the Flecktones are a mixture of acoustic and electronic music with a lot of roots in folk and bluegrass as well as funk and jazz.

Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.

Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.

I've been informed by both sides, jazz, western music, Asian music, African music, all sides, because I've been interested in the sound of the universe, and that sound is without limit.

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

When I was doing jazz concerts in America, I would use the biggest names I could find.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

In jazz, there is a lot of European influence harmonically.