Jazz Quotes

Humans are imperfect. That's one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We're on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I think I was supposed to play jazz.

I don't play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word 'jazz' only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that's fine.

My personal trainer is an ex-dancer so we do a lot of ballet and jazz.

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.

As a rule, my focus is on classical music, but I love jazz. I love everything, actually.

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.

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

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

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.

Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.

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

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues.

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

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

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

Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.

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.

I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.

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.

I like all kinds of music, though I tend to prefer jazz and classics.

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.

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.

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