Jazz Quotes

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.

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

I have a secret love of jazz.

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

It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about.

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

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.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

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.

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

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

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

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.

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

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.

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

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.

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.

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.

I've always loved jazz.

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

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

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.

Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing.

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

My music is jazz.

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.

I'd rather play jazz, I hate rock and roll.