A Quote by Brian Stokes Mitchell

People comment on the way that I phrase. And in my 20s, I realized, my phrasing is jazz phrasing. I don't comply strictly with musical theater phrasing. Musical theater tends to be very one and three, and jazz is definitely two and four.

Brian Stokes Mitchell

Quote Topics

Comment Comply Definitely Four I Realized Jazz Musical Musical Theater People Phrase Realized Strictly Tends Theater Three Two Very Way

Quote Author

Brian Stokes Mitchell
American - Actor
Born: October 31, 1957

Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.

Rachel Bloom

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

Andrew Clements

Even if you've being playing together for years, there'll always be something new. You're constantly back phrasing, front phrasing, singing faster, singing slower.

Gregory Porter

I don't think theater is dying, and musicals are a great American art form. We've got apple pie, jazz and musical theater.

Laura Benanti

We went to see all the shows. American musical theater and jazz were very big.

Carly Simon

I knew that I could sing when I was young. I would listen to a lot of jazz; I'm a big jazz fan. When I first got to high school and studied musical theater, I could sing. But I added certain things to my voice, and I realized after graduating high school that this is the kind of voice I had. It's not very nimble, but it's heavy.

Andra Day

When I was younger, I definitely thought musical theater was sort of more pure than film. I used to say I'd never go to film because we had to get it right the first time in musical theater. But then, of course, I started doing film and realized I loved it. Keep in mind that I was 8 years old when I said that.

Gaten Matarazzo

I would love to do stuff on camera. That's what I want to do. It took me a really long time to feel confident as an actor. I think, also, because there's a weird stigma about musical theater where we treat the men who do musical theater differently than we treat the women in musical theater.

Barrett Wilbert Weed

Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.

Rokia Traore

Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.

Galina Vishnevskaya

What is jazz? It, It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language. It's a musical dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America.

Branford Marsalis

I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded.

Molly Ringwald

I always wanted to do musical theater. That was where I saw my life going since I was a musical theater major in college before I went to Pentatonix.

Kirstin Maldonado

'Cabaret' was one of the first pieces of musical theater I saw that showed the possibilities of what musical theater can do.

Tom Kitt

I've sung a whole lot of jazz. It's my favorite style of music to sing. People don't realize it, because they're so accustomed to hearing me sing musical theater.

Brian Stokes Mitchell

In college, I actually majored in Musical Theater. I was pursuing a BFA in Musical Theater.