Top 1200 Jazz Musician Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.

Just like a comedian has a certain joke or a jazz musician has a riff that they know will get the crowd, a tap dancer always has a step.

Some people are born with a brain that has this weird, magical mathematical thing that makes them an amazing jazz musician.

I wasn't a jazz player, but a classical musician, and I improvised arrangements of popular songs using classical motifs.

If you're more interested in looking like a hipster, a jazz musician, or a young hunk, I'd recommend the pork pie. It has a narrow brim and a flat top.

As any jazz musician knows, it takes flexibility and adaptability for improvisation to create beauty.

My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented!

I love jazz. So to me, there are two main types of jazz. There's dancing jazz, and then there's listening jazz. Listening jazz is like Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane, where it's a listening experience. So that's what I like; I like to make stuff that you listen to. It's not really meant to get you up; it's meant to get your mind focused. That's why you sit and listen to jazz. You dance to big band or whatever, but for the most part, you sit and listen to jazz. I think it comes from that aesthetic, trying to take that jazz listening experience and put it on hip-hop.

My grandad was an opera singer, my uncle a jazz musician; I was a boy soprano in the church choir. But the first performance with Deep Purple was something I'll never forget. All elements were working brilliantly.

I play classical music almost exclusively. I never mastered jazz or gospel in the way that my mother did. She was a fine improvisational musician. I pretty much have to stick to what's written on the page.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

The worst thing about the life of a jazz musician on the road is getting to the gig. Once you're there and playing, it's marvelous.

Business today is all about improvisation, which is the essence of jazz. Perhaps in the past we could just follow the operating manual and do what we were told, but today the world is too complex and fast. Today it's all about real-time innovation and creativity. Individuals may get hired based on their resumes, but they'll get promoted and reach their dreams based on their ability to create. In that context, being a jazz musician was the best MBA I could have ever received.

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.

My aunt Ruth Brown was a jazz musician. I got hooked on it at a young age, understanding what John Coltrane was doing playing two notes on the saxophone at the same time, which is impossible.

Man, I just feel so fortunate to be a jazz musician at all. I have a hard time thinking of it any other way. It's such a fulfilling vocation. I love it.

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.

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.

That's what I tell my students at California Institute of the Arts where I taught for 27 years. I taught them if you strive to be a good person, maybe you might become a great jazz musician.

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.

When I'm working behind a camera, I feel like I'm trying to achieve something like a jazz musician does.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

"Jazz" to begin with, is a really bad word... all the true musicians that really play jazz, jazz is the worst word for it. Jazz is a process. Jazz is a creative process. It's not so much a genre, but a way of expression.

I started as a jazz musician, not a singer, then I became a rock 'n' roll artist with Aphrodite's Child.

I don't want to be defined solely by what I do as a jazz musician at a club or a festival. That's not all of me. It's not even close.

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.

The musicians in Chicago gave me my vocation, but New York calls to a jazz musician, for sure. You want to test your mettle.

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

In classical music, love is based on bitin' -- imitation. It's not based on interpretation. A jazz musician, if he plays someone else's song, has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

Many jazz musicians affect a misunderstood-genius air when they play, which alienates the audience and breaks down the communications of the music. A musician's responsibility is to get as much of his art across as possible. Musicians used to be kept when only the rich could afford art, but now practically everyone can afford radios, stereo equipment, concert tickets, etc. A musician must learn to communicate to survive.

I'd have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I'd just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.

I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.

I'm a musician, I always was a musician, and now I've got a song on the radio, so I'm definitely a musician.

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

I went to Juilliard in New York and used to do cabarets just for fun. Occasionally, I would get together with a jazz musician and play at a restaurant for cash. And I've done some background vocals for recording artists.

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).

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 most ironic thing is my grandfather has his masters in music composition; he was a jazz composer. My dad was a musician, too. He played more, like, soul music.

When I was a kid, I wanted desperately to be a jazz musician. I would practice the trumpet for hours, but when I got braces, that messed up my ability to play, so all of a sudden I had all this free time.

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

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

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.

Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant.

I fear that I won't get better and that I won't have time to practice. To be called a "jazz musician" - it's a big responsibility.

One of the most obvious aspects of the music to people who know jazz is: How does it feel in the swing? These are things that are very subtle and that jazz musician appreciate in a particular way. I appreciate the way Tommy Flanagan swings, the way that Barry Harris swings, the great pulse that Hank Jones and Bill Evans have - end every one of them is different.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

That's a skill that I'm proud of: to be able to be a jazz musician and go a bit crazy sometimes and other times be able to pull it all in and lay it down like a track.

I'm a country musician. I know how to play jazz, and I can play rock. But I've had to fight my entire career to get a little respect from people who don't understand where I come from.

I did, I was in Europe a lot. I would say, mid 20s to late 30s. Less so in the last ten or twelve years. Based on some political stuff and other things, I think I'm not the only musician, the only American jazz musician that's not going to Europe quite as much. I think we're seen a little differently in the world, unfortunately, than we were pre-Iraq invasion and things like that.

Grace Kelly plays with intelligence, wit and feeling. She has a great amount of natural ability and the ability to adapt. That is the hallmark of a first-class jazz musician.

I love music. My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented !

The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.

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.

The podcast 'A History of Jazz' began telling its story in February - 100 years after the recording of 'Livery Stable Blues' by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the start of jazz as a legitimate branch of music.

I don't really have a career as a jazz musician. I don't really have a career as a classical musician. I don't really have a career as a college professor, and yet I did all those things and I did them well. I put out some records in the 1980's and 1990's that changed the way some trumpet players played.

I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

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.

You don't have to be fearless to do anything; you can be scared out of your mind. I fear that I won't get better and that I won't have time to practice. To be called a 'jazz musician' - it's a big responsibility.

Many an American jazz musician has been beguiled by the lush melodies and sumptuous rhythms of Brazilian music, but Peter Sprague has taken the romance a good deal further than most.