Jazz Quotes - Page 3

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

This is so nice, it must be illegal.

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

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

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

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.

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.

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.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

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

Never lose the groove to find a note.

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

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

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.

Music is interior decoration.

[Jazz singing] is like pornography. You can't say what it is, but you know it when you see it.

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

They flat their fifths, we drink ours.

I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it.

Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.