Top 1200 Jazz And Life Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I don't know why people call me a jazz singer, though I guess people associate me with jazz because I was raised in it, from way back. I'm not putting jazz down, but I'm not a jazz singer...I've recorded all kinds of music, but (to them) I'm either a jazz singer or a blues singer. I can't sing a blues – just a right-out blues – but I can put the blues in whatever I sing. I might sing 'Send In the Clowns' and I might stick a little bluesy part in it, or any song. What I want to do, music-wise, is all kinds of music that I like, and I like all kinds of music.

As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

A lot of jazz artists think people should like what they're doing just because it's jazz. I don't buy that.

Just figure out what you think jazz is, and then if it fits into that category, it's jazz, and if it doesn't, it isn't. It's no big deal.

Jazz was always cool. That was what I liked about jazz - it was always cool. Now I see the cats that were basically cool getting kind of uncool. So that ruins what I feel about jazz.

Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it's not a fad. It's up to us to see to it that it stays alive.

My mother was into opera and my father was into jazz, so there was a lot of jazz in the house where I grew up.

One of my songs was on a jazz station for awhile. It was a song that I wrote for a jazz sax player friend of mine, and I sang and played the guitar on it.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties.

Jazz can accommodate so many things. Jazz is like the universe: it's been expanding since its creation, and it's connected to everything.

Jazz is a fighter. The word 'jazz' means to me, 'I dare you. Let's jump into the unknown!'

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

The people at Jazz at Lincoln Center are an amazing group and have done a phenomenal job teaching kids and audiences of all ages about jazz.

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

I got my love of jazz from my stepfather, who was a jazz musician.

I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I'd buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful!

I especially like Duke Ellington jazz, which is a little more... I lived in New York for a while. I lived in Harlem for a bit, and I just fell in love with the idea of that era of New York, that jazz era, especially jazz in Harlem.

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.

I grew up in a jazz household. They made me listen to jazz before I could hear my Motown.

I can only be me. I do what I do, I'm not a jazz player. ... I don't play jazz standards, at least not in any recognizable way. It's not my turf but I have plenty of respect for that style of playing.

I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.

Jazz is a music that really allows a person to express his deepest self, his most personal self - Africa being the primary source of jazz. Naturally, improvisation and swing are a part of jazz, improvisation being the key.

I find as much inspiration from the forerunners of jazz as I do the modern-day innovators of jazz.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

You can start from any source material, and you can approach it with a jazz ear, and then it will become a jazz moment.

Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.

I've always felt that most jazz artists don't need producers .. most jazz artists know what kind of sound they want. They don't need a producer to come in there and tell them, "Oh, I think you should do this." I've always found it very strange that there's been such a thing as producers in jazz.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

The French - they like jazz, they've been on jazz a long time.

There are a million examples of not feeling the jazz, but using the jazz.

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music.

If I'm not a jazz player all the time, I've at least been cued in to what I do by jazz.

I have a big love for jazz music. The only thing I hated about singing with a jazz band was having to wear a gown to everything.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

Childhood, all me influences were, say, between the time that I can remember, which would have been about three years old to the time that I was about five or six years old, all the music that I ever heard was jazz and it was American jazz, and it was big-band jazz, to be more defined.

Jazz is all about being in the moment. Whatever the music is making you feel, jazz gives you the freedom. That's the same genesis as hip-hop.

I think we're an inspiration to young people, to know they can be honest and not run away from influences that are not jazz. We're definitely breeding a new wave of jazz, for real.

I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.

One interesting thing about jazz, or art in general, but jazz especially is such an individual art form in the sense that improvisation is such a big part of it, so it feels like it should be less soldiers in an army and more like free spirits melding. And yet, big band jazz has a real military side to it.

Certain music, jazz in particular, has the ability to make you a better citizen of the world. It helps you expand your world view and gives you more confidence in your cultural achievements. Improvisational jazz teaches you about yourself while the swing in jazz teaches you how to work with others

I'm a jazz musician by education and vocation, but I don't think jazz should [ dictate] what I want to do.

Jazz and Cuba are inexorably tied together; it's not a branch from a tree. Latin music is part of the root of jazz.

Jazz sometimes can be really complicated and inaccessible to people because they don't know what to start with. You can start with something that you love, but if you start with something that you hate, then it's like, 'You know what, I hate jazz.' It took me a lot of time to catch on to jazz, too.

I've always had a love for music, and it developed as I learned jazz, blues, and gospel. And I performed with jazz singers in New Orleans.

I've listened to Jazz since I was born and always knew I'd be a Jazz singer!

Being jazz-trained, things happen spontaneously. Even though it's funk rock, we still have the instincts of a jazz musician.

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

I do ballet and pointe work. I also do tap, commercial jazz and technical jazz, freestyle street dancing.

I got into playing the jazz. I played jazz for a good while. I did the popular stuff first. You got the "Twelfth Street Rag" and those kinds of things. Then I got to hanging around with a bunch of guys starting to playing jazz. We'd go from one place to the other and take our instruments, just perform for free.

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.

I'm not a jazz artist. Don't get me wrong now, it's all music to me. I just played music and if it's likeable, someone liked the sound, then fine, but I'm not interested in being a jazz musician. I don't consider myself a jazz musician. I don't have anything to do with that word.

The French - they like jazz, theyve been on jazz a long time.

There aren't any labels - all jazz means is improvization and you can never play a tune the same way twice. So jazz spills over into everything.

But sometimes that title 'jazz' can vex people who think they know exactly what jazz always is and will be.

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.