Quotes on Jazz

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

Author: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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.

Author: Luther Allison

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

Author: Mose Allison

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

Author: Mose Allison

Clifford Brown was in the jazz circles considered to be probably the greatest trumpet player who ever lived.

Author: Herb Alpert

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

Author: David Antin

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

Author: Louis Armstrong

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

Author: Louis Armstrong

It is rare that even a jazz musician finds an individual voice.

Author: David Baker

I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.

Author: Travis Barker

And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.

Author: Travis Barker

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.

Author: Count Basie

I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends.

Author: Walter Becker

One of the things I like about jazz, kid, is I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?

Author: Bix Beiderbecke

I stayed with them for about a year up there and, at night, worked over in Long Island at a club called The High Hat Club which was like a pseudo jazz / blues place.

Author: William Bell

I've been invited to do a trio with a fantastic jazz guitarist and a harmonica player.

Author: Karen Black

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.

Author: Ritchie Blackmore

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

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

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

Author: Ken Burns

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

Author: Gary Cherone

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

Author: Jim Coleman

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

Author: Rita Coolidge

I've always loved jazz.

Author: Rita Coolidge

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

Author: Rita Coolidge

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

Author: Rita Coolidge

I've always wanted to record a jazz record. I did one in the '70s with Barbara Carroll. It's been a journey.

Author: Rita Coolidge

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

Author: Paul Desmond

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

Author: Kevin Eubanks

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

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

Author: Jan Garbarek

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

Author: Jan Garbarek

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

Author: Jan Garbarek

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

Author: Greg Ginn

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

Author: John Goodman

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 was uplifted by what I did.

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 know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.

Author: Norman Granz

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

Author: Norman Granz

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

Author: Benny Green

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

Author: Colin Greenwood

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

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

Author: Justin Guarini

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

Author: Merle Haggard

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 think I was supposed to play 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

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

Author: Herbie Hancock

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

Author: Herbie Hancock

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

Author: Mahalia Jackson

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

Author: Joseph Jarman

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

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

Author: Keith Jarrett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Chuck Mangione

To most jazz critics I was basically Kenny G.

Author: Herbie Mann

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

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

Author: Branford Marsalis

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

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

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

Author: Henri Matisse

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

Author: John Mayall

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

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

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

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

Author: Pat Metheny

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

Author: Pat Metheny

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

Author: Pat Metheny

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

Author: Glenn Miller

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

Author: Van Morrison

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

Author: Van Morrison

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

Author: Gerry Mulligan

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

Author: Jack Nicholson

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

Author: John Otto

I think jazz is a wonderful learning tool.

Author: John Otto

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician.

Author: Michael Parkinson

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

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

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

Author: Suzi Quatro

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

Author: Robert Quine

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

Author: Ted Rall

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

Author: Lou Reed

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

Author: Anwar Robinson

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

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

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

Author: Dave Ronk

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

I'm not a jazz singer.

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

Author: Jon Secada

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

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

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

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

I was totally into jazz in my teens.

Author: Andy Summers

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

Author: Toots Thielemans

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 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

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 was exposed to jazz early on.

Author: Mark White

Tone on jazz guitars is a real tough issue.

Author: Mark White

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

And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.

Author: Debra Wilson

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

Author: Tony Wilson

I'm not a big jazz fan.

Author: Warren Zevon