Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

I'm not a big jazz fan.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I'm not a one-stop music shop with jazz improv in aisle 3 and country and western in aisle 4. I have a fairly focused and established kind of melody and approach, so people know what they're getting into when they go into business with me.

I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.

I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.

I'm now a legend, whether I want to be or not.

Improvisation in the jazz sense - like the business sense - is not formless. It is built on a skill set. Jazz, for example, involves selecting a tune.

Improvising musicians are musical travelers, voyagers. There is a freedom to wander the musical landscape.

Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

I'm reserved, so I've always needed to find a way of opening up. Jazz helped me do that.

I'm sure there are people who say like, "I was wearing weird emo eyeliner," but there's something pretty embarrassing about the jazz phase.

I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.

I'm very glad to have met you. I like your playing very much.

I'm very influenced by jazz drummers. I always liked drummers like Roger Taylor, Keith Moon, Ian Paice, John Densmore. I just learned from playing to those drummers.

In 1994, I started touring again and I recorded two albums for Chesky Jazz.

In jazz improv, there is no such thing as wrong notes, only notes that are better chosen and it's not about the note you play, it's about the note you play next.

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

I never liked blues music, and I really didn't like jazz. I liked Chuck Berry.

In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I’m very much a jazz poet.

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

I prefer her [Nina Simone's] jazz period much more so than her folk period.

I prefer no one to teach me. I prefer to swing on my own.

I played in rhumba bands, mickey mouse bands; all kinds of bands.

I read cover to cover every jazz publication that I could and in the New York Times, every single day reading their jazz reviews even though I didn't put them in the films. I wanted to know what is going on.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

I resolved to play my trumpet like a sax.

I recorded my first jazz record in the '70s.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

Is jazz a rhythm, or is it a vibration?

I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.

I started to play Jazz music in my early teens. A boyfriend brought records over, so I listened to everything

I ... started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that's just the way it came out.

I still got my Ferrari.

I strive for honesty in playing what I feel.

I still insist that American performers are the best performers in the world.

I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.

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

It doesn't have to be happy music to be inspiring.

I think all of us begin as writers. I wanted to be a writer from the time I as eight, long before I heard of jazz. The question is, once you have that obsession, what is your subject going to be and you often don't know for some time. It might become fiction, it might be non-fiction, and if it's non-fiction it can go in any number of directions.

It ["Begin the Beguine"] became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had. It was the first time that a so-called swing band played something melodic and still gave it a beat.

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

I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz music. I still can't stand to listen to it.

I think Wes Montgomery is the greatest jazz guitarist that ever lived.

It quickly becomes apparent that in the gray area between jazz, R&B and soul, Tony Adamo is one of the top voices.

I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of Jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.