Jazz Quotes

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.

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.

I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

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.

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.