Top 1200 Jazz Music Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise.

Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.

The way I like to think about it is, even though I started music early - I started in classical music - it wasn't until I discovered jazz that I really fell in love with music and realized this was what I wanted to do for a living.

When you're talking about your own music every day, listening to bands, going to festivals, you can kind of lose sight of your initial connection with music. Instrumental music - especially jazz - helps me refocus.

People ask me to describe how I play, and the most obvious answer is that I'm a jazz influenced guitar player. But I'm not a jazz guitar player. Wes Montgomery was a jazz guitarist, Joe Pass was a jazz guitarist (laughs).

My sister loved country music. My mother loved Spanish music. And my dad was into big band music and jazz.

My dad was a huge big band and jazz fan, and we both sort of enjoyed be-bop, but man, it required so much skill to play it. And then there was cool jazz, the era that Miles, Coltrane, and Ornette ushered in, and that found a home in me. It turns out that that music was just really where I breathed.

I lived in the Caribbean when I was a teenager, so I learned about Salsa and Cha-Cha and all these Latin Afro-Cuban music like Gillespie and Duke Ellington, also bridged with Jazz. But my mother is Greek, and so I've also listened a lot to Greek music. And through the years to Balcanic music to Arabic music because my father loved music from Egypt.

I was always inundated with music, whether it be my mother's favorites like Fleetwood Mac and Carole King and the Carpenters, or my dad's jazz music.

My dad had these great Benny Goodman albums that I was obsessed with, and Louis Prima's another guy I loved, and Peter Niro the jazz pianist. I loved international music: Irish music, Mexican music. I love the different colours that they all have.

I get most of my influences from specific genres. I listen to a lot of R&B music, obviously. But, jazz, and bossa nova music, too.

What I wanted to do was music, until I was about 16. But it was jazz and rock, never classical music.

I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock-n-roll with jazz, and I thought I could make some money playing music.

I have to admit that more and more lately, the whole idea of jazz as an idiom is one that I've completely rejected. I just don't see it as an idiomatic thing any more...To me, if jazz is anything, it's a process, and maybe a verb, but it's not a thing. It's a form that demands that you bring to it things athat are valuable to you, that are personal to you. That, for me, is a pretty serious distinction that doesn't have anything to do with blues, or swing, or any of these other things that tend to be listed as essentials in order for music to be jazz with a capital J.

Hip-hop has a feeling element, it's not just about knowing music. It's not like classical music or jazz where you can go on raw energy.

Salsa, classic rock, soul music, jazz... all of that was a part of my education in making hip-hop music.

I still go out, but not a lot. If I go to see music, it's usually to the Blue Note, jazz clubs, things like that. When I travel, I find out where the jazz clubs are.

Big band music, to me, it really has three key elements. First is the lyrics are really sweet, and they're just really family-friendly. The second thing is the music is jazz music, so the music is complicated enough to hold your attention for 5 or 6 million plays. That makes the songs interesting. The last part is the fact that it's danceable.

If I was not a film-maker I'd probably be a musician. I like Kanye West, Jay-Z, R&B, classical, jazz and all kinds of music, but I'd say soulful World Music is my favorite.

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

I have very eclectic taste in music. I like everything from Nirvana, which is featured in the film, to world music, to orchestral and jazz. For me, the nineties were about Oasis, because I was travelling around Britain when that band exploded onto the music scene.

None of the jazz greats made music for the purpose of you going to check out music before them. Michael Jackson didn't make music so you could go check out Sam Cooke.

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

All New Orleans music is based off dance music, even jazz.

Jazz was the pop music of its day, and all American popular music has stemmed from it one way or another.

I really like the complexity of jazz, the emotional depth; I feel like there's no other music that's really as satisfying as jazz.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

Steve Marcus was one of the greatest saxophonists in all of music. He truly was able to unite jazz with the popular music of the time.

Music was not a big deal to me when I was in middle school. And then I slowly became a big jazz fan. Even more than concerts, a lot of my high school time was spent going to jazz clubs in the city.

I find that jazz loosens up the deep place of my mind, lets me find my own strange rhythms. Generally, I find the knottier the jazz, the better. Anything with singing is a distraction. Listening to classical music tends to have the unconscious effect of making my writing too smooth.

Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.

I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.

Rock music was the death of jazz in a way. I know there's a bunch of people who say jazz isn't dead, but I mean, rock 'n roll, you play three chords to 20,000 people; jazz, you play 20,000 chords to three people.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

I was in punk rock bands, heavy metal bands, world music bands, jazz groups, any type of music that would take me. I just love music.

Music is a huge part of my life, I enjoy every genre of music from jazz to country, and I even get down with a bit of hip hop.

I listen to and I play all kinds of music, and I'm interested in jazz and in bluegrass - I like it all - but Cuban music speaks to me in a certain way.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.

the grace is being able to like rock music, symphony music, jazz … anything that contains the original energy of joy.

I worry more about the marketing that's taken hold since the 70s. The Jazz era, the Swing era, those were huge. Entire decades were named for music. In the 1940s - after World War II - changes in taxation, ballrooms closing, people moving to the suburbs, and the onset of target marketing and the confusion of commerce with art caused some things to happen as a result that have taken us away from jazz and what jazz offers us.

I love jazz music and sad music.

I have a difficult relationship with jazz. My parents really love it, and I went to a school where jazz was considered the best thing ever, so I had to leave it be for a long time. But now I'm rediscovering it. I'm approaching jazz in a different way.

New Orleans had a great tradition of celebration. Opera, military marching bands, folk music, the blues, different types of church music, ragtime, echoes of traditional African drumming, and all of the dance styles that went with this music could be heard and seen throughout the city. When all of these kinds of music blended into one, jazz was born.

I usually listen to surf music, not much instrumental music, and when I was younger I listened to jazz.

I love many kinds of music: world music, jazz, classical, pop.

I studied classical and jazz music and went to a music school.

The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways, jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.

Both of my mom's parents were music teachers, so I got a lot of knowledge about everything from classical music to jazz to musicals.

I always used to say I'm definitely not a straight-ahead jazz singer, because then there's people who would hear what I do and say, 'Is it jazz? I don't know...' Whatever it is, it really comes down to creating music that makes people feel something.

I'd rather call it "instrumental creative music," especially the music that I've been doing. If a person would hear that music, they would undoubtedly call it "jazz." There is this whole generation of musicians that are playing and thinking critically for themselves and making music that's relevant to today. I hope that's the objective of a lot of musicians.

I love music, and a lot of it. Jazz is probably on the top with guys like Miles Davis. But I even enjoy music from the '60s and '70s.

What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.

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

My father had played cornet, although I never saw him play it. I found his mouthpiece when I was a kid. I used to buzz it. And my mother played piano and sang in the church choir for different functions. So there was always music in the house, jazz, gospel, or whatever. Especially jazz records.

In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

My dad would play me all of these records: Miles Davis records, John Coltrane records, Bill Evans records, a lot of jazz records. My first exposure to music was listening to jazz records.

I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and am a product of a family that were jazz aficionados and also very interested in progressive politics. And so I had a lot of artists and musicians in my home. Lots of Latin music, folk, and jazz and blues, bluegrass-type of stuff. Painters and stuff like that.

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.