Top 1200 Jazz Improvisation Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I studied jazz at home with my grandparents. They always had jazz dudes at the house, but I didn't study formally. I just hung around a lot of musicians.

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

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.

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

Sometimes people that are very good at improvisation in life, meaning like stage improvisation, aren't good in films because you have to ultimately take a scene where it needs to go. It's not about just saying something that's funny. You can say something funny but if it's not on story or driving the scene to its end it's really not very helpful at all.

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

It's very interesting to read why Cornelius Cardew became disenchanted with academic avant-garde music. He wanted to reach as many people as possible and change their consciousness. He wanted to reach the "working classes" in England. The kind of music he was making was very much from the academy, even though it had a lot in common with things like free jazz and improvisation, and he felt that it was the music of the elite, and that he wasn't really speaking to the people.

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

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.

Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.

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

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

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've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

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.

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.

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.

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

In 1962 I wrote for 'Jazz News,' using the pseudonym Manfred Manne, which I picked because of a jazz drummer with that name. I later dropped the 'e.'

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

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

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

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

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

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

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.

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.

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

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.

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.

Improvisation, the main thing is it teaches you to be in the moment and present in the moment and be reactive and proactive for what's going on. Someone gives you something - a lot of actors are a little shut off, so they're just doing, "This is my character, these are my lines, I'm going to just send it to you then you send whatever you're sending." Improvisation teaches you to really be listening.

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

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.

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