Jazz Quotes - Page 21

That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

He's no Bill Clinton!

It doesn't have to be happy music to be inspiring.

You have to enjoy playing. The old-timers did, and that's one reason why their music is a lasting music. I feel that I play jazz to entertain the listener, and you just can't do that unless you yourself are entertained at the same time.

Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential.

When I was 12, I began listening to John Coltrane and I developed a love for jazz, which I still have more and more each year.

Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not forlong, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.

[Billy Strayhorn] understood the violin as well as he understood Jazz, and he wrote for the violin as a violin.

Unlike anything heard before. This is jazz for the 21st century.

I resolved to play my trumpet like a sax.

Jazz has endured because it doesn't have a beginning or an ending. It's a moment.

The most common misconception about me is that I'm basically a jazz singer.

Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence.

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 always called him the Dizzy Dean of music, he was so belligerent and braggadocio... But one thing I always noticed about Jelly, he would back everything he said by what he could do.

I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.

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.

Jazz is part folk art, part progressive art.

Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

I can imagine an utter hatred for the jazz avant-garde.

Steve Marcus was one of the greatest saxophonists in all of music. He truly was able to unite jazz with the popular music of the time.

Scott Feiner is a soulful magnet for the fusion of Brazilian and jazz music.

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics.