Jazz Quotes

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.

Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you're into jazz.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Everybody in all countries tries to play jazz.

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.

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

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.

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

I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I'd buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful!

I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word 'jazz' means to them, and that's fine.

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

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

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.