300 Quotes on Jazz

• I'm not a big jazz fan.

  Author: Warren Zevon

• My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it.

  Author: Neil Young

• There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

  Author: Robert Wyatt

• As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

  Author: Edgar Winter

• Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

  Author: Tony Wilson

• And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.

  Author: Debra Wilson

• I'm always looking for ways to develop as an artist, especially as a jazz artist-to find different ways of testing my voice.

  Author: Cassandra Wilson

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

  Author: Cassandra Wilson

• Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

  Author: Cassandra Wilson

• Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.

  Author: August Wilson

• The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

  Author: Lucinda Williams

• Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.

  Author: Paul Whiteman

• Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.

  Author: Paul Whiteman

• Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

  Author: Paul Whiteman

• Tone on jazz guitars is a real tough issue.

  Author: Mark White

• I was exposed to jazz early on.

  Author: Mark White

• Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.

  Author: Eberhard Weber

• You need better technique than I have to play jazz, but what you have to do is the same thing, isn't it?

  Author: Charlie Watts

• I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself.

  Author: Miroslav Vitous

• 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.

  Author: Miroslav Vitous

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

  Author: Miroslav Vitous

• 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.

  Author: Miroslav Vitous

• 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.

  Author: Bobby Vinton

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

  Author: Alan Vega

• Jazz was my first love.

  Author: Frankie Valli

• 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.

  Author: Charlie Trotter

• Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden!

  Author: Toots Thielemans

• Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians.

  Author: Toots Thielemans

• I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.

  Author: Lynn Swann

• I was totally into jazz in my teens.

  Author: Andy Summers

• I'm just trying to avoid any sort of generic kind of music - I don't want to do generic jazz or fusion.

  Author: Andy Summers

• It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.

  Author: Jim Sullivan

• Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

  Author: John Sousa

• I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school.

  Author: Chad Smith

• We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.

  Author: Chad Smith

• To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

  Author: Nina Simone

• Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

  Author: Nina Simone

• When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

  Author: Joe Simon

• We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.

  Author: Carly Simon

• I'm not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues.

  Author: Dinah Shore

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

  Author: Matthew Shipp

• 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.

  Author: Matthew Shipp

• It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.

  Author: Archie Shepp

• I don't like freedom jazz - I think it's void of roots and void of foundation.

  Author: George Shearing

• Personally, I think young musicians need to learn to play more than one style. Jazz can only enhance the classical side, and classical can only enhance the jazz. I started out playing classical, because you have to have that as a foundation.

  Author: Doc Severinsen

• I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.

  Author: Doc Severinsen

• The jazz chord substitutions in a country song... that was another thing that bent people's ears. I guess that my favorites are the unique ones. It's not how fast you play. It's that unique blending of different stuff I'm most proud of.

  Author: Brian Setzer

• Well I went to New Orleans to cover the jazz festival for Trio, it's this new arts channel, it's really great.

  Author: Amy Sedaris

• I have a bachelor's and a master's in jazz.

  Author: Jon Secada

• After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

  Author: Gunther Schuller

• I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

  Author: Boz Scaggs

• I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

  Author: Boz Scaggs

• I'm not a jazz singer.

  Author: Boz Scaggs

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

  Author: George Santayana

• Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to what?

  Author: David Sanborn

• If you met my dad, I think a lot of things would be put to rest. Because my pops is a pretty silly guy. But, Coldcut, they're based in the U.K. I'm a big fan of jazz music, so American music has had a big influence on what I listen to.

  Author: Eric San

• Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

  Author: Francoise Sagan

• There is an apprenticeship system in jazz. You teach the young ones. So even if the musicians weren't personally that likable, they felt an obligation to help the younger musicians.

  Author: Dave Ronk

• I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

  Author: Dave Ronk

• Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

  Author: Dave Ronk

• I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• I enjoy playing clubs. I still enjoy the closeness of the nightclub venue. However, after a certain period of time and after playing around some of the clubs in New YorkI felt that jazz should be presented in a more prestigious atmosphere.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• I don't want to appear hostile, like I'm hostile to L.A. or that I feel that the people don't appreciate jazz. I don't think it's that. I think it's something more. It's something a little bit more complicated than that.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• I've played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I've been fortunate enough to play with them, a who's who. All of those guys, I've been fortunate enough to have performed with.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• 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?

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• 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.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don't think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact.

  Author: Sonny Rollins

• I listen to jazz and gospel... yeah that's basically what I listen to.

  Author: Anwar Robinson

• Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.

  Author: Max Roach

• If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.

  Author: Lee Ritenour

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

  Author: Charlie Rich

• If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

  Author: Buddy Rich

• Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

  Author: Marc Ribot

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

  Author: Lou Reed

• I've gone the full spectrum - from gospel to blues to jazz to soul to pop - and the public has accepted what I've done through it all. I think it means I've been doing something right at the right time.

  Author: Lou Rawls

• I think jazz is good, but I don't enjoy it. It's not for me.

  Author: Ted Rall

• After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

  Author: Robert Quine

• Rock and roll mainly but I can play passable jazz also.

  Author: Suzi Quatro

• My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.

  Author: Louis Prima

• Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.

  Author: Madeleine Peyroux

• I listened to Billie Holiday a lot in order to learn to sing. She remains one of the extraordinary jazz singers. But my intent is to become my own voice, to be able to interpret these songs in my own way.

  Author: Madeleine Peyroux

• You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That's jazz.

  Author: Oscar Peterson

• Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing.

  Author: Oscar Peterson

• Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play.

  Author: Oscar Peterson

• It's sort of what jazz would be if it stopped being snobby and what rock would be if it stopped being stupid.

  Author: Andy Partridge

• In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

  Author: Michael Parkinson

• 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.

  Author: Evan Parker

• I think jazz is a wonderful learning tool.

  Author: John Otto

• Jazz was more of a tool for me to use to enhance my musicality.

  Author: John Otto

• The blues and jazz will live forever... So will the Delta and the Big Easy.

  Author: Jack Nicholson

• I like jazz, but I could never play it. You just sit there with a guitar the size of a Chevy on your chest, wearing a stupid hat, playing the same solo for an hour.

  Author: Dave Mustaine

• Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones.

  Author: Gerry Mulligan

• It's true I've always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way.

  Author: Gerry Mulligan

• I was a beginner again. I practiced hard and used to listen very closely to recordings of American jazz drummers such as Tony Williams and Kenny Clarke.

  Author: Jamie Muir

• Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

  Author: Jelly Morton

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

  Author: Van Morrison

• The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

  Author: Van Morrison

• Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.

  Author: Ikue Mori

• I don't limit my taste. There's some jazz that I like and there's some opera. I've been listening to what was essentially country music, but it crossed over to rock.

  Author: Rick Moranis

• Everybody in all countries tries to play jazz.

  Author: Thelonious Monk

• I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

  Author: Adrian Mitchell

• I haven't a great jazz band, and I don't want one.

  Author: Glenn Miller

• I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about jazz.

  Author: Pat Metheny

• I think I represent a more left-wing view of what jazz is.

  Author: Pat Metheny

• Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

  Author: Pat Metheny

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

  Author: Pat Metheny

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

  Author: Pat Metheny

• I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.

  Author: Olivier Messiaen

• I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

  Author: John McLaughlin

• Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.

  Author: Brian McKnight

• Most of the stuff I learned to play, I learned in high school. I had a band in high school, a jazz-fusion thing, and I was the keyboard player. I was interested in how the instruments worked and the theory behind playing with them.

  Author: Brian McKnight

• I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I'm still and quiet inside, I'll begin. It's very personal; it has to be. One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece.

  Author: Bobby McFerrin

• I'd actually been making my living as an organist with bands since I was probably 15 or 16 years old, and then as a senior in high school I put together a jazz quintet called The Bobby Mack Jazz Quintet.

  Author: Bobby McFerrin

• Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

  Author: Bobby McFerrin

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

  Author: John Mayall

• Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

  Author: Henri Matisse

• People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.

  Author: Wynton Marsalis

• There's the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you're playing.

  Author: Wynton Marsalis

• 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.

  Author: Wynton Marsalis

• That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• The whole point is, give me a break with the standards. You go to the average jazz label and suggest a record and they want to know which standards you're going to play. I'm saying let's break the formula.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• The lion's share of what I hear right now are people who, intentional or accidental, have avoided all jazz prior to 1960. And all the musicians who were successful in the '60s spent their entire lives, prior to 1960, listening to all the musicians these people avoid.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• It's something that jazz has gotten away from, and it's unfortunate. Players aren't physical anymore.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• Jazz fans love Miles and I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

  Author: Branford Marsalis

• I'm basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I'm good. I think I'm a very poor piano player.

  Author: Ray Manzarek

• If there was no black man there would be no Rock'n'Roll. The beat, the rhythms of Africa are what created Rock'n'Roll and Jazz.

  Author: Ray Manzarek

• To most jazz critics I was basically Kenny G.

  Author: Herbie Mann

• I was blessed to work with The Jazz Messengers when the two piano players were Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

  Author: Chuck Mangione

• In 1994, I started touring again and I recorded two albums for Chesky Jazz.

  Author: Chuck Mangione

• 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.

  Author: Chuck Mangione

• 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.

  Author: Chuck Mangione

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

  Author: Melvin Maddocks

• Well, I had started a program which is even longer running than this one in 1967 which was a jazz program called The Best of Jazz and that still goes out on Monday nights. That's been going for 33 years or something.

  Author: Humphrey Lyttelton

• I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

  Author: Gary Lucas

• The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.

  Author: Federico Lorca

• New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.

  Author: Gyorgy Ligeti

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

  Author: Philip Levine

• My music is jazz.

  Author: Yusef Lateef

• Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.

  Author: Bill Laswell

• 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.

  Author: Steve Lacy

• I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

  Author: Steve Lacy

• I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

  Author: Steve Lacy

• Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

  Author: Steve Lacy

• Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

  Author: Steve Lacy

• Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.

  Author: Steve Lacy

• There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

  Author: Steve Lacy

• I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock-n-roll with jazz, and I thought I could make some money playing music.

  Author: Robby Krieger

• My first guitar, a Fender Jazz Master, I traded it in for a Les Paul Deluxe.

  Author: Lenny Kravitz

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

  Author: Alexis Korner

• I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

  Author: Alexis Korner

• As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be some jazz.

  Author: Lee Konitz

• Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

  Author: Lee Konitz

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

  Author: Lee Konitz

• Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

  Author: Lee Konitz

• Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

  Author: B. King

• I also like Western classical music and jazz.

  Author: Nusrat Khan

• Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at jazz. And I've done that on many occasions.

  Author: J. Johnson

• The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.

  Author: Billy Joel

• I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

  Author: Wyclef Jean

• Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

  Author: Keith Jarrett

• 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.

  Author: Al Jarreau

• I've been informed by both sides, jazz, western music, Asian music, African music, all sides, because I've been interested in the sound of the universe, and that sound is without limit.

  Author: Joseph Jarman

• You know, Equal Interest played at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival Awards and not one musician from that category was even thought of. Even thought of! The idea, that here's this vital energy, and that element doesn't even know it exists!

  Author: Joseph Jarman

• Well, actually, I don't consider myself a jazz legend or anything.

  Author: Joseph Jarman

• I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.

  Author: Etta James

• My mother was a jazz fanatic and she wanted me to play the piano so I could play jazz tunes. I wish I had learned but I was too busy getting into trouble!

  Author: Etta James

• Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

  Author: Ahmad Jamal

• One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can't count it.

  Author: Mahalia Jackson

• Gospel music rhythms are not African in origin, although I know that's what the jazz experts say.

  Author: Mahalia Jackson

• My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period.

  Author: Tony Iommi

• I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.

  Author: Jon Huntsman, Jr.

• 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.

  Author: Charlie Hunter

• I played saxophone, so I was into jazz. I learned from each audience and each teacher that I had. I can't really tell you any rules or anything, but the way I develop my beliefs is really just by personally learning from different situations.

  Author: Chad Hugo

• 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.

  Author: Dave Holland

• I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.

  Author: Billy Higgins

• Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.

  Author: Billy Higgins

• The first thing is, jazz is one of the few things to let you know that there is a God and there is a creation.

  Author: Billy Higgins

• The French - they like jazz, they've been on jazz a long time.

  Author: Billy Higgins

• The people in Japan know more about the history of jazz and the musicians than the people in the United States do.

  Author: Billy Higgins

• It's something that - jazz is one of the few things that you can go and listen to, I don't care where you're from, what you are, what background you come from - there's something there for you.

  Author: Billy Higgins

• My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.

  Author: Dan Hicks

• This music that was supposed to only come from tapes like in any restaurant. Something would happened. One bird will start to do a little jazz thing, and another bird will start to answer.

  Author: John Hench

• Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

  Author: Percy Heath

• I progressed through so many different styles of music through my teen years, both as a player and a vocalist, particularly the jazz and pop of the early 20th Century.

  Author: Jeff Healey

• 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.

  Author: Coleman Hawkins

• If it comes out sounding like Dixieland jazz or classical or punk or rock or even slightly metal, that's because that's where I'm going to find inspiration.

  Author: Ben Harper

• The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

  Author: Herbie Hancock

• It's not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

  Author: Herbie Hancock

• It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

  Author: Herbie Hancock

• I think I was supposed to play jazz.

  Author: Herbie Hancock

• Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

  Author: Herbie Hancock

• Jazz is about being in the moment.

  Author: Herbie Hancock

• One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

  Author: Herbie Hancock

• Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.

  Author: Jan Hammer

• My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer.

  Author: Jan Hammer

• My roots and Victor's are jazz, basically, but these two young fellows that we have with us come out of rock bands. And they're tremendously exciting players.

  Author: Chico Hamilton

• I love good rock'n'roll, blues and jazz, gospel, and a little reggae.

  Author: Jerry Hall

• Diana Krall knocks me out. I like jazz and I like her simple approach.

  Author: Merle Haggard

• 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.

  Author: Charlie Haden

• 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.

  Author: Charlie Haden

• I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they'll become a great musician.

  Author: Charlie Haden

• 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.

  Author: Justin Guarini

• Jazz is not the format where I want to stay, but it really is a starting point for me.

  Author: Justin Guarini

• Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

  Author: Bill Griffith

• 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.

  Author: Jonny Greenwood

• Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

  Author: Colin Greenwood

• A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

  Author: Benny Green

• 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.

  Author: Benny Green

• The first jazz pianist I heard was Thelonious Monk. My father was listening to an album of his called 'Monk's Dream' almost every day from the time I was born.

  Author: Benny Green

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

  Author: Norman Granz

• Amsterdam must have more than a million people. But the only area where jazz is really profitable and successful in an economic sense is in Japan. That's because they haven't been exposed enough.

  Author: Norman Granz

• I'm concerned with trend. I don't know where jazz fans will come from 20 years from now.

  Author: Norman Granz

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

  Author: Norman Granz

• I don't want to sound as if I'm doing something tremendously special. But I am a jazz fan.

  Author: Norman Granz

• I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.

  Author: Norman Granz

• The economic picture in the States today doesn't allow for jazz concerts in a tour fashion. People now are too used to the Festival, which gives them more names for the same price.

  Author: Norman Granz

• Jazz was uplifted by what I did.

  Author: Norman Granz

• When I was doing jazz concerts in America, I would use the biggest names I could find.

  Author: Norman Granz

• The history of all big jazz bands shows was, first they played for dancing, and then they played for singing.

  Author: Norman Granz

• The public, hearing pop music, is, without knowing it, also soaking up jazz.

  Author: Norman Granz

• 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.

  Author: Mike Gordon

• 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.

  Author: Dexter Gordon

• In jazz, there is a lot of European influence harmonically.

  Author: Dexter Gordon

• What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

  Author: Dexter Gordon

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

  Author: John Goodman

• I like a lot of electronica. I like older jazz rather than newer.

  Author: Greg Ginn

• We didn't go for music that sounded like blues, or jazz, or rock, or Led Zeppelin, or Rolling Stones. We didn't want to be like any of the other bands.

  Author: Michael Giles

• You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

  Author: Stan Getz

• As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

  Author: Stan Getz

• 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.

  Author: Frank Gehry

• Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing.

  Author: Jan Garbarek

• The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

  Author: Jan Garbarek

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

  Author: Jan Garbarek

• The whole rise of new adult contemporary music and smooth jazz was a nice surprise.

  Author: Kenny G

• From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.

  Author: Bill Frist

• To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.

  Author: Robert Fripp

• I lie around the floor with my cats Billy and Jazz or watch DVDs with my best friends.

  Author: Cathy Freeman

• I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.

  Author: Jonathan Frakes

• You know, it's funny... when you're making money, people don't think you're playing jazz. Now when you're not making money, people think that you're a good jazz musician.

  Author: Pete Fountain

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

  Author: George Foreman

• Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

  Author: Roberta Flack

• Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

  Author: F. Fitzgerald

• 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.

  Author: Mike Figgis

• The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

  Author: Maynard Ferguson

• Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.

  Author: Maynard Ferguson

• Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

  Author: Bill Evans

• I think Wes Montgomery is the greatest jazz guitarist that ever lived.

  Author: Kevin Eubanks

• If you play jazz, then you play with your fingers. If you're playing rock, you use a pick. There's really no rhyme or reason to that other than that's just the way it has been.

  Author: Kevin Eubanks

• 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.

  Author: Keith Emerson

• Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

  Author: Ralph Ellison

• If one takes all the styles in jazz harmonically from the earliest beginnings to the latest experiments, he still has a rather limited scope when compared to the rest of music in the world.

  Author: Don Ellis

• By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

  Author: Duke Ellington

• The way that I got involved with microtonal music was, frankly, through jazz.

  Author: John Eaton

• I love many kinds of music: world music, jazz, classical, pop.

  Author: Anita Diament

• Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

  Author: Paul Desmond

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

  Author: Rick Derringer

• I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

  Author: Don DeLillo

• The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

  Author: Miles Davis

• And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

  Author: Elvis Costello

• Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

  Author: John Corigliano

• I wanted to make a jazz record. I didn't want it to be a standards record.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• 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.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• I recorded my first jazz record in the '70s.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• I've always loved jazz.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• When I sang that song, I felt it was almost as if some force had moved into my body. Things like that have only happened to me singing jazz. It doesn't happen when singing pop. I get so deeply into the music, it feels like I've become someone else.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

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

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• 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.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

  Author: Rita Coolidge

• Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

  Author: Ornette Coleman

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

  Author: Jim Coleman

• Then I took 8 years of French Horn, first jazz, and then classical.

  Author: Jim Coleman

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

  Author: Cy Coleman

• I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.

  Author: Nat Cole

• I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.

  Author: Gary Cherone

• What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

  Author: Ray Charles

• What I see for the band by the end of this year is the Complex live at the Montreux Jazz Festival. I want my guys to be comfortable. I'm certainly not in this for the money, but I'd really like to see my guys make some money off of this stuff.

  Author: Jimmy Chamberlin

• Lately, I've been listening to some jazz albums. I love the new Pat Metheny album. John Coltrane. I still like good metal, though!

  Author: Geezer Butler

• By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

  Author: Ken Burns

• A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

  Author: Ken Burns

• Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

  Author: Ken Burns

• I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities.

  Author: Ken Burns

• I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

  Author: Ken Burns

• We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

  Author: Ken Burns

• The stories from 1975 on are not finished and there is no resolve. I could spend 50 hours on the last 25 years of jazz and still not do it justice.

  Author: Ken Burns

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

  Author: Ken Burns

• I have been steadily exchanging a rock audience who were nervous about what they had just bought for a jazz audience who not only were happy with their purchase, but are increasingly coming again.

  Author: Bill Bruford

• Well, jazz is to me, a complete lifestyle. It's bigger than a word. It's a much bigger force than just something that you can say. It's something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

  Author: Ray Brown

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