Jazz Quotes

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.

Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.

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.

You know I want to sing for people, I want to jazz people up I want to make new music that they've never heard.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

Jazz has an audience all around the globe and has had for many decades, I think speaking of the United States, let's say that what we need is more of an official recognition.

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.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.

You're just sort of searching for this "thing" and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

It's sort of what jazz would be if it stopped being snobby and what rock would be if it stopped being stupid.

Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.

We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.

The people in Japan know more about the history of jazz and the musicians than the people in the United States do.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at jazz. And I've done that on many occasions.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about jazz.

I've been dancing my entire life. Jazz, hip hop, ballet. And then there's tap dancing. I love to tap.

What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.