Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

Many jazz artists go to L.A. seeking a more comfortable life and then they really stop playing.

Many of the jazz musicians whom are no longer here. You don't realize that it's history when it is happening and then time passes and you look at a picture and you say "Wow, there is history attached to that.

Marijuana is taken by musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type.

Men have died for this music. You can't get more serious than that.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

Miles'd got killed if he hit me.

Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn't consider himself part of a tradition.

Miles got a mystique about him-plus he's at the top of his profession. And he's got way, way, way more money.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

Monk encouraged me to emancipate the drums from their subservient role as timekeepers.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

Montreal was a very active jazz center until club owners started putting in strippers instead of music. Before long, there was nothing to hear.

Music is interior decoration.

Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers.

Most of the international acceptance of jazz education can be traced to the University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, and the wonderful program they inaugurated.

Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.

Music is my religion.

Music is my religion. Music is the only thing that has never failed me. People let you down, music won't.

Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions, which let themselves be described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed to man in music, and in that is its power and significance.

Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life.

Music should never be harmless.

Music is the greatest communication in the world.

Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

My first guitar, a Fender Jazz Master, I traded it in for a Les Paul Deluxe.

My contributions were many: First clown director, with witty sayings and flashily dressed, now called master of ceremonies.

My D'Angelico is a jazz archtop guitar. That guitar was made for Glenn Miller's guitar player in 1939. It's a '39 D'Angelico New Yorker.

My mom would have liked it that I patterned myself more after Jimmy Reed.

My main influences have always been the classic jazz players who sang, like Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole and Jack Teagarden.

My mother always wanted me to be a jazz singer, but I always wanted to be raunchy.

My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer.

My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it.

[My wife Margot] was the - I guess, the coordinator or the production manager [of The Jazz Review], and we got to know each other and we married.

My songs were influenced not so much by poetry on the page but by poetry being recited by the poets who recited poems with jazz bands.

My personal trainer is an ex-dancer so we do a lot of ballet and jazz.

My work has been marginalized as far as the jazz-business complex is concerned, or the contemporary-music complex.

Never lose the groove to find a note.

New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm.

New Orleans jazz is a complex and embracing art form that began about the same time as the blues and encompassed many of its excellences.

Ninety-five percent of my audience was white.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that's when I was born.

Nobody knows where jazz is going, because nobody has ever known where jazz was going. I mean, you couldn't possibly predict the Swing Era from the '20's or bebop from the Swing Era or Avant-garde from Bebop, or Effusion, or on and on and on. So, we don't really know where it's going.

No one is original. Everyone is derivative.

Nothing says “i came here to win” like jazz hands

North Texas is by far the most serious minded jazz program I have encountered.

One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport.

One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.