Jazz Quotes

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

The beauty of jazz is that it's malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.

I don't regard myself as a great classical or jazz pianist. I like country music, but I'm not a great player. I just like music. Drums 'n' bass is pretty exciting and I'd love to explore it.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout.

For years, Jazz At The Philharmonic albums were the only ones of their kind.

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.

I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards - Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin.

I can turn on some jazz guitarist, and he won't do a thing for me, if he's not playing electrically. But Jeff Beck's great to listen to.

In fact, jazz has such a great feeling and great emotional content that it really doesn't require you to have technical understanding of it. I think you just have to allow your feelings to go with the music and you will find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

Everything we did, we did live - and then Bobby took it home and chopped it up and edited it. Which is pretty much what they did with every jazz record you've ever heard.

I've been working on something, just some jazz, relaxed stuff. It will be standard, just piano and voice. It started out as a fun project for me though, I'm still not sure about releasing it.

If it has more than three chords, it's jazz.

The way that we imitate each others' riffs is something that other bands don't do as much. If we're jamming with a jazz band, or I am jamming with a jazz band, I have to catch myself, the tendency is always to do that.

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record.

Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

People sometimes say it takes a long time to become a jazz fan, but for me it took about five seconds.

Some people say there was no jazz tenor before me. All I know is I just had a way of playing and I didn't think in terms of any other instrument but the tenor.

Shoes are a big part of your look. I think that if your outfit isn't really something special, then fun footwear is a great way to jazz it up and make your ensemble more interesting.

I missed jazz, kind of. And by the time I came to it in life, it was too intimidating to enjoy thoroughly.

The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - that is confrontational. That's just a part of the language of jazz - at a certain point.

I always told the people at Cal Arts that if they wanted me to do Jazz studies, first of all, there couldn't be a big band within 500 miles and that I could do what I wanted to do. And they said I could.

Possibly, I should have been a jazz singer from the beginning.

I listen to classical music very much. There's a lot of jazz that I don't enjoy listening to.

Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I'm on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes.