Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

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 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 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 my view a jazz musician is a great musician

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

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.

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.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

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

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

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 resolved to play my trumpet like a sax.

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

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.

Is jazz a rhythm, or is it a vibration?

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

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

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

I still got my Ferrari.

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 strive for honesty in playing what I feel.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

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.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

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

It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing.

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.

It's not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

It's much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn't listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, '67.

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

It's like an act of murder - you play with intent to commit something.

It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me.

It's not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.