Jazz Quotes

I played Big Band jazz music. I wasn't into rock and roll. I was just there because it was a living. I surprised everyone. I'm still surprising people.

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

There's a certain phraseology involved in jazz, and I've moved away from that.

He would catapult you forward, and that was his intention with the Jazz Messengers. He would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

But if you want to be a songwriter-based musician, whether you play punk or rock or country or jazz, whatever, you have to work on your songwriting and you have to work on being able to play in front of people, I think. That performance is how you create the groundwork for a lasting career.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

Jazz was my first love.

I used to be a jazz snob, believe it or not. I sort of turned my nose up at anything more commercial.

Free form jazz means absolutely nothing to me. Because there are no boundaries.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

I was pretty much prepared because I was already playing in extremely good ways when I arrived from Europe because I played jazz four or five years before I arrived here.

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

Lately I've been listening to some classical music again, some jazz.

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.

As a matter of fact, we put it down because we wanted to be jazz pickers.

I have a secret love of jazz.

I've often cringed when I heard myself described as a jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a jazz vocalist.

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.

So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.

I'm not a big jazz fan.

I love the sounds of Latin jazz, R&B, hip-hop, alternative, all that stuff. I'm a radio kid.

As long as there are musicians who have a passion for spontaneity, for creating something that's never been before, the art form of jazz will flourish.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

I'm not a jazz singer.

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

I wanted to play some more grown-up music - jazz.

My brother had a big band in high school; after that we continued to play together, eventually forming a group called the Jazz Brothers, that recorded for Riverside Records.