Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

Widening blood puddles spilled from suffocating death wounds.

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.

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

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

A beat is a moment in the life a groove.

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

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

After two takes you're imitating yourself.

A genius is the one most like himself.

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.

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

All bad jazz sounds like Woody Woodpecker.

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.

All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues.

A jazz beat is a dynamic changing rhythm.

All them weird chords which don't mean a thing...you got no melody to remember, and no beat to dance to

All music is beautiful.

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.

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.

An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

All the music you've ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head. I don't reject that, I use it.

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

And I used to listen to a lot of jazz.

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.

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

Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz.

As a rule, my focus is on classical music, but I love jazz. I love everything, actually.

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

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

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

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.

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

Bebop has set music back twenty years.

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 is] Chinese music.

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

Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me.

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

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That's why I wanted the clarinet.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

Blow your life through your horn.

Bop is no love-child of jazz.

[Billy Strayhorn] understood the violin as well as he understood Jazz, and he wrote for the violin as a violin.

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

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.

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

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of Jazz.

Certainly, jazz has become more of a niche, which is surprising, because it's our music. It's the national music of America.