Jazz Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Tone on jazz guitars is a real tough issue.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Even though I left for a year, I grew here as a Jazz man. If I'm fortunate enough to go into the Hall of Fame, I will go as a Jazz man.

Music is a huge part of my life, I enjoy every genre of music from jazz to country, and I even get down with a bit of hip hop.

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.

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

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

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.

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.

I wasn't very aware of pop music because I attended an arts school. For me, it was all about jazz.