Top 1200 Jazz And Blues Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

The world I live in is benefiting from things like satellite radio. Jazz and blues fests are everywhere now, and Americana is going strong on college radio. What I'm hearing is an appreciation of real music.

I've gone the full spectrum - from gospel to blues to jazz to soul to pop - and the public has accepted what I've done through it all. I think it means I've been doing something right at the right time.

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.

Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.

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).

I listen to all kinds of music myself; it can range from practically anything: Opera, Jazz, to Blues, good Pop, just about anything.

I listen to, like, funky Chicago blues. I love blues, but I love the funky, happy blues. There's a song about pretty much everything, including kidney stones, believe it or not. So there's something there for whatever you happen to be suffering, you know?

I love swing, jazz, blues, standards. I love the American songbook, Gershwin, Berlin. It's all that. So I'm born in the wrong era and I just don't fit into the 21st century at all.

A lot of what I listened to growing up was blues, but also folk and indie music. So there's this marriage of songs that structurally are quite bluesy. Sound-wise, there's a lot of indie as well. But you can't really say I'm pop-blues, because that's insulting to blues. It just can't exist.

After my early days of being a passionate young Elvis fan, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. I got interested in Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Then I got turned on to the blues. I realized how important it was to our music in England at the time. Everyone was into the blues. Then you start looking at the different kinds of blues, and you follow the journey backwards from Chicago to earlier times back down to the Delta to the Memphis Blues.

Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'

Purple - I mean, the music and the influence and the subliminal touches range from orchestral conversation to jazz to blues and soul and God knows what. It's a vast range of expressions.

African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll.

As we all know, the evil of slavery and the sting of the whip have given us many things including the voice of Nina Simone, the prose of James Baldwin, the Air Jordan sneaker, the blues, jazz, moonwalking, and more recently gangsta rap.

I'm not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues.

There are many influences in my music, not only blues. R&B, Motown, gospel, old timey, jazz, even classical are all part of what I do. I started with classical, then country, then blues, and after that I started listening heavily to Motown and gospel. My earliest efforts as a songwriter were soul. Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett, Gladys Knight, James Brown, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Fontella Bass are just a few of the names that come to mind as the God's of soul and Motown.

I was listening to a lot of bebop. And to Miles Davis. Everyone thinks I was just in the folk world in 1966, but in 1963 and 1964, I was absorbing enormous amounts of music, from baroque to jazz to blues to Indian music.

To me, the blues is an infection. I don't think it's necessarily a melancholy thing; the blues can be really positive and I think I think anyone and everyone can have a place for the blues. It need not always a woeful, sorrowful thing. It's more reflective; it reminds you to feel.

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It is the only culture that America has brought forth.

My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.

I stayed with them for about a year up there and, at night, worked over in Long Island at a club called The High Hat Club which was like a pseudo jazz / blues place.

I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.

When I sort of step in my jazz world, it's somewhere between instrumental jazz and vocal jazz.

But in Shimabukuro's hands, as he breaks out experimental jazz, lays down a steady blues train, or shreds on rock anthems, this little jumping flea becomes a melodic monster.

The beauty of jazz is that it can accommodate all styles. You can take jazz and put rock in it, and it's still jazz.

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll.

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

I have always loved jazz music and as a teen growing up in New York City and then later on as an adult have great memories of the jazz clubs that were all located on 52nd Street. I still catch as many jazz shows as I can when I am in New York. And when I perform, I have my jazz quartet by my side. Jazz musicians keep things spontaneous and very "live," which is the way I like to perform.

See, I have a different type of music from other peoples. They playing the other kind of blues, and I'm playing cotton-patch blues.... Ain't nobody now can play the blues that I play.

Blues means what milk does to a baby. Blues is what the spirit is to the minister. We sing the blues because our hearts have been hurt, our souls have been disturbed.

From jazz, the blues, country and rock to Hollywood movies, culture has in many ways been our greatest export (or our most obnoxious one, depending on your point of view).

There's a lot of women in blues music, lots of strong women and that sort of stuff. It's not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about blues. There were a lot of powerful blues guitar players in the olden times that were women. It's just that when you think about blues, you have this one image in your mind.

If you like rock and roll, if you like rhythm and blues, if you like jazz, if you like hip-hop, you might be black-ish.

I've always listened to jazz or folk or blues. I was always listening to the prophets. I don't really go for...I don't know how to say anything about the singles scene without slamming people.

I got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.

There's such a wealth of arts and styles within the guitar... flamenco, jazz, rock, blues... you name it, it's there. In the early days my dream was to fuse all those styles. Now composing has become just as important.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.

When I came to The Moody Blues, we were a rhythm and blues band. I was lousy at rhythm and blues - I think the rest of us were.

I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly 'Frankenstein' had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there's one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues.

I would not describe myself as an avid jazz fan and I am not a jazz musician myself. However, that is not to say that jazz does not play a vital and important role in my life.

My style of singing is very much Latin jazz meets Latin and a little bit of rhythm and blues. When I do ballads, my fans love it. They want to listen to my classics. They want to party.

You could play the blues like it was a lonesome thing - it was a feeling. The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?

We didn't go for music that sounded like blues, or jazz, or rock, or Led Zeppelin, or Rolling Stones. We didn't want to be like any of the other bands.

When I'd hear something that sounded like I could follow it - most of those big band jazz tunes are blues anyway - I would hum it and play with the fiddle while I was humming.

You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church.

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.

In the Bay Area, there was a resurgence of Dixieland jazz in the '40s - there was the Frisco Jazz Band, and Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band.

My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well-known blues musicians.

I was very adamant about not being called a jazz singer, but now I've embraced it. The way I approach music is through jazz, so I'm a jazz singer.

For guitar players especially, blues is the foundation of rock and roll. You take country music and rock and roll and jazz and you mix it together, and that's my basic makeup.

You can't seperate modern jazz from rock or from rhythm and blues - you can't seperate it. Because that's where it all started, and that's where it all come from - that's where I learned to keep rhythm - in church

I wanna record these girls individually. And then, I wanna cut a blues album on me. But all of it, original stuff, you know. When I listen to the blues today, it's like they all sounds similar. I wanna do something different, to try to add to the blues flavor.

I was in a rock band; I was my own folk singer; I was in a death metal band for a very short time; I was in a cover band, a jazz band, a blues band. I was in a gospel choir.

Jazz is an endless source of ideas, because you can use anything. You can play operatic arias. You can incorporate them into jazz. You can play gypsy music and incorporate it into jazz. You can European classical and you can incorporate it into jazz. You can use anything and jazz it up, as they used to say.

I'm very fortunate that I really like acting, but it's not all I want to do. I love to sing. I love blues. I love jazz.

I grew up with KTSU, and that station gave me so much info about the pantheon of black sounds: reggae, gospel, blues, soul, hip hop, and mostly they played jazz. That was a major part of how I understood music.

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.

Because we grew up in Australia, to find information about a lot of blues guys, I used to go to the library and find the jazz magazines. They didn't even sell them at the time in news agents and stuff.