Jazz Quotes

I don't know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

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'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.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

Once you start collecting records you learn more and more about jazz and blues.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

I think what we need is a more welcoming mode from the people who put on a hundred million country-western shows on television. How about a monthly jazz show?

I usually listen to surf music, not much instrumental music, and when I was younger I listened to jazz.

The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

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.

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.