Top 1200 Jazz Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

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, 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

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

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'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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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 think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

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

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

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

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

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.

My foundation is jazz. I do all the things jazz musicians do.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.'

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.