Jazz Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.