Best 709 quotes in «jazz quotes» category

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Never lose the groove to find a note.

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

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

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

Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and those of Thelonious Monk

Pain can be washed out with a song. / Pain can become jazz digested and transformed.

On the radio I listen to the easy-listening stations, the jazz stations.

People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.

Personally, I can't see how anyone can produce any beautiful music out of being angry.

Player for player, there’s 
no better working band in jazz than The Cookers.

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

People always ask, "Why jazz?" and I'm like "Why not?" It's kind of like asking Seurat, "Why so many dots?" I imagine if you asked Bjork, "Why the Tibetan bells?" She'd probably be like "That's just what I heard." It's the same thing. This is just the way I see music.

Phil Robson is a disturbingly good jazz guitar player!

Rejoice at the death and cry at the birth: New Orleans sticks close to the Scriptures.

Records used to be documents, but now record companies want product.

Rock and roll mainly but I can play passable jazz also.

Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.

Scott Feiner is a soulful magnet for the fusion of Brazilian and jazz music.

Possibly, I should have been a jazz singer from the beginning.

Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat.

Romanticism implies nostalgia for damaged goods.

Science Fiction is the jazz of literature.

So easy, when you know how.

She has been more famous, over a longer time span, than any other female singer.

Since about 1980 Kenny Werner has been one of jazz’s unsung heroes

Somebody asked me once, 'Do you think that swing will ever come back?' And I said, 'Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?'

Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.

Some guys said 'Here's bop!' Wham! They said, 'Here's something we can make money on!' Wham! 'Here's a comedian!' Wham! Here's a guy who talks funny talk!'

Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

So much of Jazz doesn't have an audience other than music students or musicians.