Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

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.

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

When you scratch these guitars, they bleed.

Widening blood puddles spilled from suffocating death wounds.

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

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

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

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.

A genius is the one most like himself.

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

After two takes you're imitating yourself.

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.

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

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

Always pack your uniform on top.

Always look ahead, but never look back.

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

All music is beautiful.

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.

An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Bebop has set music back twenty years.

Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me.

[Bebop is] Chinese music.

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

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

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.

Blow your life through your horn.

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

Bop is no love-child of jazz.

Brownstein's is a fresh and jaunty voice, with a jazz snap all his own.

Brubeck, for instance, is not careless. He's a studied guy. And even if his picture ends up on the back cover of Life, he's still a studious guy.

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