Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

Welcome to Book-a-holic Anonymous. Hi, I'm Jazz and I am addicted to the written word. I love the smell of the blackest ink sliding across texture paper. My eyes squint against the loss of time within the pages of story. I don't think there's a cure for my compulsion to lose myself within life and times of those characters bound between the covers.

You play me with your jazz & leave me with the blues.

When stealing from other players, an older musician wisely advised me, choose a different instrument from your own, and people won’t notice the theft.

Widening blood puddles spilled from suffocating death wounds.

We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don’t just say I’m grown and ought to know. I don’t. I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want… well, I didn’t always… now I want. I want some fat in this life.” “Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it.” “You don’t know either, do you?” “I know enough to know how to behave.” “Is that it? Is that all it is?” “Is that all what is?” “Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?” “Oh, Mama.” Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth. Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn’t do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking? - Violet Trace and Alice Manfred

When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.

You hear lots of notes, don’t you? Some have a major sound. Some have a minor sound. But there’s not one blue note among all these black and white keys. The real blues, the soul of the sound, comes from the spaces in-between.

Your idea of romance requires a corset and a time machine.

A friend told me he'd risen above jazz. I leave him there.

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

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

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

After two takes you're imitating yourself.

A genius is the one most like himself.

All music is beautiful.

A jazz musician is not a jazz musician when he or she is eating dinner or when he or she is with his parents or spouse or neighbors. He's above all a human being . . . the true artform is being a human being.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

All bad jazz sounds like Woody Woodpecker.

All the music you've ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head. I don't reject that, I use it.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

All them weird chords which don't mean a thing...you got no melody to remember, and no beat to dance to

An artist can only be evaluated after he's dead. At the 11th hour he might do something that will eclipse everything else.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

A name doesn't make the music. It's just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

Always pack your uniform on top.

And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.

Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

Are you stalking me, Mr. Fulton?" The idea both amused and horrified Jazz.

And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

Anything you are shows up in your music - jazz is whatever you are, playing yourself, being yourself, letting your thoughts come through.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.

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

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

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

As far as music school goes, I walked through Berkelee one time.

As I've grown older I've been more influenced by more meandering styles of guitar playing, whether it's Celtic or Ethiopian folk music or some kind of noisier jazz like Sonny Sharrock. In terms of songwriting, I don't know that I could even pin it down.

At a time when individualism is becoming an endangered species, jazz represents a celebration of the individual.

Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me.

[Bebop is] Chinese music.

Bebop has set music back twenty years.

Blow your life through your horn.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That's why I wanted the clarinet.

[Billy Strayhorn] understood the violin as well as he understood Jazz, and he wrote for the violin as a violin.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

Bop is at the end of the road. Now everybody wants dance music.

Because it has such a ragged movement. It suggests something like that.

Bop is no love-child of jazz.