All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues. — Mose Allison
Jazz is the favorite music [of America]. It is a type of music invented by [American] Blacks to please their primitive tendencies and desire for noise. — Sayyid Qutb
Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance. — Francoise Sagan
To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question! — Louis Armstrong
Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm. — Jelly Roll Morton
Jazz I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk music. — George Gershwin
Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend. — George Gershwin
Jazz will be the classical music of the future. — Dizzy Gillespie
Jazz washes away the dust of every day life. — Art Blakey
The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness. — Herbie Hancock
Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now. — Pat Martino
Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat. — Carmen McRae
Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around. — Miles Davis
Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world. — Ahmad Alaadeen
The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll. — Muddy Waters
Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking. — Nina Simone
Jazz is a beautiful word. I love it. — Dexter Gordon
I love classic rock, rock and roll, that's the top notch. I love soul - bluesy music as well. — Haley Reinhart
Jazz And Blues Image Quotes
My baby lives in shades of blue, blue eyes and jazz and attitude. — Lana Del Rey
If i don't have red, I use blue.
Blues Music Quotes
Everybody started calling my music rock and roll, but it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playing down in New Orleans. — Fats Domino
I would like to involve myself in some black music. I would like to do some blues and some gospel music. I want to try stuff from other genres and try to widen my musical base. — Greg Lake
Music means communication to me. I say 'listen you people out there, listen to my music, let's be one.' Music is a friend to me when I am lonely, when I am blue. You can't define music 'cause music is cosmos and it knows no barrier or definition. You have to feel music to dig it. — Robert Plant
The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning. — John Lee Hooker
If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music. — Keith Richards
With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues. — Brian Setzer
There is a big blue sky waiting just behind the clouds.
I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues. — Jack White
I would think, to me, growing up in the south, growing up with all the gospel music, singing in the church and having that rhythm and blues - the blues background was my big inspiration. — Jackie DeShannon
The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits. It's better keeping the roots alive, because it means better fruits from now on. The blues are the roots of all American music. As long as American music survives, so will the blues. — Willie Dixon
They say the blues is sad, but when B.B. sings 'I got a sweet little angel, I love the way she spreads her wings,' that don't sound too sad to me! — Buddy Guy
Rhythm And Blues Quotes
It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues...It's called rock now. — Chuck Berry
When you sit down and think about what rock 'n' roll music really is, then you have to change that question. Played up-tempo, you call it rock 'n' roll; at a regular tempo, you call it rhythm and blues. — Little Richard
I wanna show that gospel, country, blues, rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll are all just really one thing. Those are the American music and that is the American culture. — Etta James
Jazz is not a what, it is a how.
Rock ’n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm. It's the rhythm that gets to the kids – they're starved of music they can dance to, after all those years of crooners. — Alan Freed
I love Ruth Brown, not just her singing, but Ruth Brown has more girl power than anyone, because she fought hard against people who ripped her off and then helped other artists through the Rhythm and Blues Foundation. — Ronnie Spector
Rock'n'roll is nothing but Boogie Woogie with stuff on top of it. And if you're black, they name it rhythm'n'blues, and if you're white, they name it rock'n'roll. So, I don't give a... You know. — Ike Turner
I invented the colors of the vowels!--A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green--I made rules for the form and movement of each consonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses. — Arthur Rimbaud
Rhythm and blues used to be called race music. ... This music was going on for years, but nobody paid any attention to it. — Ray Charles
We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues. — Anne Lamott
My brother Alex fell in love with rhythm and blues early and gave me a strong dose of it. — James Taylor
Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music. — Sergei Rachmaninoff
Technically, I'm not a guitar player, all I play is truth and emotion. — Jimi Hendrix
My music is the spiritual expression of what I am — my faith, my knowledge, my being...When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups...I want to speak to their souls. — John Coltrane
My music is the spiritual expression of what I am: my faith, my knowledge, my being. — John Coltrane
Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once. — John Coltrane
I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years. — Thelonious Monk
There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind. — Duke Ellington
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others. — Harry J. Anslinger
The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen. — Duke Ellington
Singing The Blues Quotes
Be like the bluebird who never is blue, For he knows from his upbringing what singing can do — Cole Porter
I think a guy who's had just the right amount of booze can sing the blues a hell of a lot better than a guy who is stone sober. — Charlie Rich
A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies. — Etta James
Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing gospel you have the feeling there is a cure for what's wrong, but when you are through with the blues, you've got nothing to rest on. — Mahalia Jackson
The harmonica is the most voice-like instrument, you can make it wail, feel happy, or cry. It's like singing the blues without words. — Charlie Musselwhite
I sing God's music because it makes me feel free. It gives me hope. With the blues, when you finish, you still have the blues. — Mahalia Jackson
The air is like a butterfly
With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks at the sky
And sings. — Joyce Kilmer
And then I think we realized, like any young guys, that blues are not learned in a monastery. You've got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back and then you can sing the blues. — Keith Richards
When I'm singing the blues, I'm singing life. — Etta James
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing. — Ethel Waters
Jazz And Life Quotes
Each man has his own music bubbling up inside him. — Louis Armstrong
If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it. — Louis Armstrong
All a musician can do is to get closer to the source. — John Coltrane
Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play. — Charlie Parker
The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons. — Imamu Amiri Baraka Jones
The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons. — Amiri Baraka
The whole of life itself expresses the blues. That's why I always say the blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling and understanding. The blues can be about anything pertaining to the facts of life. The blues call on God as much as a spiritual song do. — Willie Dixon
Whatever I'd say would be an understatement. I can only say my life was made much better by knowing him. He was one of the greatest people I've ever known, as a man, a friend, and a musician. — John Coltrane
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time. — Ornette Coleman
Chicago Blues Quotes
Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana. — Robert Plant
And I come here as a daughter, raised on the South Side of Chicago - by a father who was a blue-collar city worker and a mother who stayed at home with my brother and me. — Michelle Obama
I love songs, and I love songwriting, and there's a standard of songwriting within Chicago blues in particular. I don't like the sad blues, necessarily; the Chicago blues is what I like, which is the kind of blues you can dance to. — Sinead O'Connor
For me, jazz, R&B, jump swing, Chicago blues, country blues, early hillbilly music, and honky tonk all stem from the same source — Duke Robillard
It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well. — Tim Cahill
There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money. — Muddy Waters
When I think about a Chicago sound, I think about the Great Migration from the South. Many of Chicago's black artists are from Mississippi, Arkansas, and with them was brought blues and gospel music. — Rhymefest
R&B is everything. Hip Hop, Soul, Gospel and Classical Blues are everything. All of that makes sense in BJ The Chicago Kid and what we do. — B.J. The Chicago Kid
I listen to, like, funky Chicago blues. I love blues, but I love the funky, happy blues. There's a song about pretty much everything, including kidney stones, believe it or not. So there's something there for whatever you happen to be suffering, you know? — Sinead O'Connor
I think of rock 'n' roll as a combination of country blues and swing band music, not Chicago blues, and modern pop. — Bob Dylan
Playing Jazz Quotes
Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one. — Miles Davis
My brother had a big band in high school; after that we continued to play together, eventually forming a group called the Jazz Brothers, that recorded for Riverside Records. — Chuck Mangione
I like jazz, but I could never play it. You just sit there with a guitar the size of a Chevy on your chest, wearing a stupid hat, playing the same solo for an hour. — Dave Mustaine
The music I like to play is Rock 'N Roll. I like to rock like a wild animal. I like to rock it well enough to whip a yak's ass. I love to rock it good on a horse's ass. I like to rock it real hard. I love to rock it all the way to Russia. I like to kick out the Jazz and kick it out all the way. — Wesley Willis
Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going. — Wes Montgomery
It's the honesty you apply to your playing that makes music enjoyable. The style of the music has little to do with it. It's only honesty makes it beautiful. — Elvin Jones
Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan. — Brian McKnight
A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life. — Jaco Pastorius
I'm not a jazz artist. Don't get me wrong now, it's all music to me. I just played music and if it's likeable, someone liked the sound, then fine, but I'm not interested in being a jazz musician. I don't consider myself a jazz musician. I don't have anything to do with that word. — Pharoah Sanders
Jazz Musician Quotes
I have no illusions about being a genius musician. I pride myself on being a soldier, a warrior for jazz. I trained a lot of young people, and I've learned my lessons well. I'd like to keep the flame burning. — Phil Woods
Marijuana is taken by musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type. — Harry J. Anslinger
Well, I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gonna keep playin' — Clark Terry
I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case & throw in a piece of raw meat. — Wes Montgomery
After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz. — Gunther Schuller
There's a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste. — Sarah Vaughan
As far as being a 'player's player,' you've only got to go to Nashville or Argentina and you can forget about it. The world is full of amazing guitar players, and you know it, and I know it...it's a humbling experience. — Mark Knopfler
A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality. — Glenn Miller
Music represents nature. Nature represents life. Jazz represents nature. Jazz is life. — Sonny Rollins
I don't believe in geniuses, I believe in hard work. — Michel Petrucciani
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. — Luther Allison
It seems all worlds of music - rock, blues, R&B, soul, hip-hop and others - are able to point to impromptu get-togethers as proud moments in their timelines, encounters that were recorded and created music of lasting impression. In the jazz tradition, there are a few, but none that has been revered for as long as Jazz at Massey Hall. — Ashley Kahn
My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer. — Miles Davis
When I die, I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it. — Rahsaan Roland Kirk
I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I'm still and quiet inside, I'll begin. It's very personal; it has to be. One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece. — Bobby McFerrin
It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception. — Albert Einstein
As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music. — Edgar Winter
I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice. — Boz Scaggs
I joined Count Basie's band to make a little money and to see the world. For two years I didn't see anything but the inside of a Blue Goose bus, and I never got to send home a quarter. — Billie Holiday
People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile. — Alan Lomax
The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren't worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice. — Lucinda Williams
I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and am a product of a family that were jazz aficionados and also very interested in progressive politics. And so I had a lot of artists and musicians in my home. Lots of Latin music, folk, and jazz and blues, bluegrass-type of stuff. Painters and stuff like that. — Jack Waters
There's such a wealth of arts and styles within the guitar... flamenco, jazz, rock, blues... you name it, it's there. In the early days my dream was to fuse all those styles. Now composing has become just as important. — Jimmy Page
In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me. — Jelly Roll Morton
Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues. — Willie Nelson
Our past as well as our future. It could have been completely destroyed when we were brought to the New World as slaves. They even took away our drums. And I don't want to talk about all those negative things going on. But its music is more present in our lives than ever. Blues, samba, calypso, reggae, jazz, salsa, Africa is everywhere. — Randy Weston
I was playing organ at a silent movie house at Harlem and they'd be showing some death scene on the screen. Likely as not, I'd grab a bottle and start swingin' out on 'Squeeze Me' or 'Royal Garden Blues'. The managers complained but, heck, they couldn't stop me! — Fats Waller
What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man. — Ray Charles
The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing. — Buddy Guy
Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything. — Edgar Meyer
Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition. — Wynton Marsalis
I stayed with them for about a year up there and, at night, worked over in Long Island at a club called The High Hat Club which was like a pseudo jazz / blues place. — William Bell
Bill Monroe spoke of bringing 'ancient tones' into his music with echoes of British and Irish fiddle and bagpipe music, while also delving deeply into American blues, gospel, folk hymnody, and hill country dance music. To that gumbo, he added the invigorating rhythms and harmonies of hot jazz. It was a new kind of American music, named in honor of his band The Blue Grass Boys to be known, simply, as bluegrass. — Paul Zollo
I'm not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues. — Dinah Shore
What isn’t on my iPod playlist? I have very eclectic tastes. Jazz. Classic Rock. Hip Hop. Ska. Soul. Electronica.World Music. Funk. Blues. Chamber Music. Reggaeton. Gospel. And a whole lot of Prince. (I am a Minnesota gal through and through.) — Michele Norris
The jazz band's chief stimulus, of course, was the rise of the negro 'blues' and their exploitation by the negro song-writer, W. C. Handy. — Bix Beiderbecke
My folks have played everything from rock, disco, pop, funk, and blues. My dad has always brought and played different genres like jazz, classical, and Latin. With all this in my pocket, I feel I have a taste of everything for my influences. — Haley Reinhart
I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly 'Frankenstein' had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there's one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues. — Edgar Winter
I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels. — Ernest Gaines
There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. — Donald Miller
African American music can't happen in Germany or in Italy or in Mumbai. If America disappeared off the face of the Earth today, the greatest single cultural loss would be blues, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, rock-and-roll. — David Simon
I like to mix and match things so I'm infusing a little bit of jazz, a little bit of classical, a little bit of soul, into the whole blues idiom and I'm coming up with something that I'm really interested in. — Gino Vannelli
I grew up in the funk, rock and roll, blues and r&b tradition, and I came to this thing we call jazz later. And I came to improvise music from the standpoint of jazz; I was improvising, but within these other genres of music. — Hamid Drake
My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50's and 60's and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians. — Walter Becker
My early influences were the Shadows, who were an English instrumental band. They basically got me into playing and later on I got into blues and jazz players. I liked Clapton when he was with John Mayall. I really liked that period. — Tony Iommi
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