Jazz Quotes

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

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

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.

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.

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

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play.

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

New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock.

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.

Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

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

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.

Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there.

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.

I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture.

I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.

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

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

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

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.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

I don't want to sound as if I'm doing something tremendously special. But I am a jazz fan.

Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.