Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.

I'm a great jazz fan.

I'm all in favor of getting grants for musicians. Or any other good brand of Scotch.

I'm always doubting because I've been told so much that, you're not the right look or you're not the right sound, and, you know, whether I do jazz or R&B there are always complaints.

I'm a musician and, just as the critics are hard on me, I'm hard on the critics.

I'm a person of change and I must be honest to my artistry and my creativity. That's part of the word 'jazz'... it's an adventure.

I'm aware that a lot of what is happening in jazz has not had a very dynamic change in a long time.

I'm fortunate that I'm making a living at it now because I'm not equipped to do anything else.

I'm interested in music, not in my image. If someone plays something fantastic, that I could never have thought of, it makes me happy to know it exists.

I missed jazz, kind of. And by the time I came to it in life, it was too intimidating to enjoy thoroughly.

I'm into scales right now.

Imitate, assimilate, and innovate.

I'm not a jazz singer.

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

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 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.

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

I'm not a big jazz fan.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician

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.

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.

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

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

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

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

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

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

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

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 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.