Top 1200 Jazz Musician Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

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

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

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

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.

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

I grew up in a time when being a musician and learning to be a musician was actually very wonderful.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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!

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.

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

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.

If you're a musician, you're a musician; you don't ever get that out of your bones.

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

I started playing music around 13 or 14, played jazz in high school, and played other stuff in college. After college, I tried to make it as a musician. I lived in a big squalid house full of dudes outside of Boston. We were all musicians. We built this studio in the basement and played there all hours of the day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I started singing Folksongs with my mother when I was 6 years old. We sang at Folk festivals and concerts and schools. There was always music being played either on record, Jazz and Folk, by musician friends of my mother. I took to singing very early, I believe it has been a Gift I was born with.

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 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.

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.

As a little girl, I remember thinking how great it was going to be, to be a musician when I grew up, how I was going make a jazz album, then a country album, then a rock album.

I don't wanna talk about Teo [Macero]. He's a helluva musician, a brilliant musician, but he's just not for me, that's all. I can elaborate on it, but I don't want to do that.

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.

As a musician, basically the masses never thought I was a musician.

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 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.

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.

One musician listens to another musician, and you get inspired and then you do your thing, but it's yours.

Do not categorize about music. You take each musician at the time and open yourself to that musician.

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

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

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

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

Solomon was a musician and David was a musician, so it's a profession that I take seriously.

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.

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

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'd been trained as a classical musician, but also as a pop musician. My teacher made sure that everything was available.

I don't like it when a player says, 'I like freedom; I want to play for myself.' Because the player has to understand he is part of a team with 10 other players. If everyone wants to be a jazz musician, it will be chaos. They will not be a team, and nothing will be possible.

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.

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

Why a musician loves playing jazz or classical music or what makes them happy, and why an artist likes to paint - it's so hard to actually put into words what that feeling is of joy that we get, but that is what I get: a feeling of joy when the camera is rolling, even if I'm doing something that is not joyous.

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

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