Jazz Quotes

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.

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

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.

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

I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.

Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians.

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

I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

I'm a great jazz fan.

You know, it's funny... when you're making money, people don't think you're playing jazz. Now when you're not making money, people think that you're a good jazz musician.

My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer.

That's the exact concept behind the music: to take that kind of, I guess whatever you want to call it, jazz sensibility - but not have it be about solos.