Jazz Quotes

Jazz washes away the dust of every day life.

I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

My baby lives in shades of blue, blue eyes and jazz and attitude.

Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat.

One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day.

People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.

Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about jazz music.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

Imitate, assimilate, and innovate.

Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.'

Well I went to New Orleans to cover the jazz festival for Trio, it's this new arts channel, it's really great.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents, there must be respect for the people that have gone before.

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.

This is so nice, it must be illegal.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at jazz. And I've done that on many occasions.

There are no natural barriers. It's all music. It's either hip or it ain't.

There are notes between notes, you know.

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

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.

I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.

Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it. If you're swept away by it you can't wait to do it again and the same magical moments always come.

There is no such thing as a wrong note.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

I have a very varied taste in music. Everything from rap to classical to Latino to Rat Pack to jazz.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.

I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

'Swing' is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a 'swing band' in music.

Never lose the groove to find a note.

The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world.

My first relationship to any kind of musical situation is as a listener.

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Music is my religion. Music is the only thing that has never failed me. People let you down, music won't.

Music is interior decoration.

The better it gets, the fewer of us know it.