Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

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 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 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.

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

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 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 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.

Instrumental music is increasingly marginalized.

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

In my view a jazz musician is a great musician

Instrumental music can spread the international language.

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

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

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

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

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

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 recorded my first jazz record in the '70s.

I resolved to play my trumpet like a sax.

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

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 still got my Ferrari.

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 strive for honesty in playing what I feel.

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.