Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions. — Johnny Griffin
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.' — Wayne Shorter
Jazz is one of the best things that you can find in your life, it can always be your friend. — George Gershwin
Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does. — Tony Wilson
Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people. — Dexter Gordon
Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now. — Pat Martino
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time. — Ornette Coleman
Short Jazz Musician Quotes
Jazz will be the classical music of the future. — Dizzy Gillespie
Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about. — Wynton Marsalis
Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world. — Ahmad Alaadeen
Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz. — Sonny Rollins
Jazz is freedom. You think about that. — Thelonious Monk
The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness. — Herbie Hancock
Jazz, like leadership, combines the unpredictability of the future with the gifts of individuals. — Max De Pree
Jazz is a beautiful word. I love it. — Dexter Gordon
Jazz washes away the dust of every day life. — Art Blakey
All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of 'em sang blues. — Mose Allison
Jazz Musician Image Quotes
Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around. — Miles Davis
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Jazz Song Quotes
There's a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste. — Sarah Vaughan
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
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band's lead singer, Eric Burdon. "So you're the honky," she said, "who stole my song and got a hit out of it? — Nina Simone
Jazz is not a what, it is a how.
[On bebop years] All I did was sing 'How High the Moon.' It seemed like the only song I ever sang. — Ella Fitzgerald
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
I regard singing pretty much like acting. Each song is like playing a different role. I get very involved with my material. I feel a responsibility for the emotion it brings out in the listener. — Peggy Lee
Love songs last because they are about feelings that don't change. — Diana Krall
If you're gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up. — Joan Baez
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
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
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
Master your instrument. Master the music. And then forget all that bullshit and just play. — Charlie Parker
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
Live with your memories and keep them as memories and that’s great. Forget the bad times just remember the good ones and you know and hope tomorrow is a good day — Roger Meddows Taylor
You have to be open to the energy. If you can open your heart to the energy, that great love energy, of this entire universe, good things will happen to you. BUT, you've gotta believe. You've gotta believe in the goodness. — Ray Manzarek
One day you pick up the guitar and you feel like a great master, and the next day you feel like a fool. It’s because we’re different every day, but the guitar is always the same…beautiful. — Tommy Emmanuel
It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg. — Donal Henahan
The people who make it to the top - whether they're musicians, or great chefs, or corporate honchos - are addicted to their calling ... [they] are the ones who'd be doing whatever it is they love, even if they weren't being paid. — Quincy Jones
If a man can tell if he's been successful in his life by having great friends, then I have been very successful. — Johnny Ramone
The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness. — Loren Eiseley
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. — Cab Calloway
When I auditioned for my high school band the band director was excited because my father was known to be a great musician. When he heard me, he said 'Are you sure you're Ellis's son?' — Wynton Marsalis
Jazz Band Quotes
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
In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it's a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don't listen. — Chet Baker
I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff. — Jonny Greenwood
A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality. — Glenn Miller
I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school. — Chad Smith
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. — Molly Ringwald
Communication is the essential medium of a creative culture: the communal sea in which we all swim. A company that can't communicate is like a jazz band without instruments: Music just isn't going to happen. — John Kao
I wonder what an agent would do if he had to travel with the band he's booking. — Mary Lou Williams
You know somethin', man? Some day I'm gonna be walkin' up the street one way and you're gonna be comin' down the other way, and we're gonna pass each other and I'm gonna say 'Hello, best white band in the world' and you're gonna say 'Hello, best colored band in the world. — Chick Webb
Shared leadership... is less like a an orchestra, where the conductor is always in charge, and more like a jazz band, where leadership is passed around ... depending on what the music demands at the moment and who feels most moved by the spirit to express the music. — Phillip C. Schlechty
Jazz Improvisation Quotes
A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting. — Charlie Trotter
I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground. — John McLaughlin
The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts. — Ken Burns
Composing is improvisation slowed down. — Wayne Shorter
Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city. — Frank Gehry
The real power of Jazz is that a group of people can come together and create improvised art and negotiate their agendas... and that negotiation is the art — Wynton Marsalis
But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden
Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise. — George Gershwin
I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music. — Sonny Rollins
Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself. — Cecil Taylor
Jazz And Blues Quotes
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
My baby lives in shades of blue, blue eyes and jazz and attitude. — Lana Del Rey
Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat. — Carmen McRae
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
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
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
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
Music Artist Quotes
Any artist that's as serious about making music as I am, I'm cool with that. But if you tellin' me, "Man, send me a verse and I'ma send you a verse." No. That's not collaborating. We don't know each other and I'm serous about this music. — Kevin Gates
My favorite artist in the world is Michael Jackson, and he revolutionized the music video aspect of music. — Chance the Rapper
We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams. — Albert Einstein
I think all those artists are artists who are appreciated because you believe their words and you appreciate their honesty in their music. If you don't appreciate the honesty in the music, the beat can be fly as hell but you'll never give an emcee props. — Talib Kweli
I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me. — Tim McGraw
I get inspired by a lot, not jut one type of music or so. I listen to a lot of different music, and love a lot of artists. So, I can get inspired by anything. — Martin Garrix
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group. — Lesley Garrett
One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles. — Igor Stravinsky
Atlantis was a highly evolved civilization where the sciences and arts were far more advanced than one might guess. Atlantis was technologically advanced in genetic engineering, computer science, inter-dimensional physics, and artistically developed with electronic music and crystal art forms. — Frederick Lenz
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
Over all, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe. . . Thats what I would like to do. I think thats one of the greatest things you can do in life and we all try to do it in some way. The musicians is through his music. — John Coltrane
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
I will never again play anything that does not have social significance. We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we are master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we've been through. — Max Roach
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
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
All a musician can do is to get closer to the source. — John Coltrane
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
I think jazz is a beautiful, democratic music. It encourages musicians with very strong, and many times, very different points of view to work together as a team while, at the same time, giving them the space to express their individuality. It's a very important art form and can be used as a model for different cultures to work together. — Marcus Miller
Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon. — Nat Wolff
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
I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right. — Duke Ellington
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
I think all record companies should be run by a musician. Just as you wouldn't trust your health to an electrician. — Paul Bley
Musicians should never forget that we're blessed. We have a special gift that people can enjoy through us. We've had the good fortune to receive this and pass it along to others. — Ed Thigpen
One of the great moments of my life was when I could write musician on my passport. — Jon Anderson
What 'jazz' means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term 'jazz' has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians. — Maxim Gorky
Women and rhythm-section first!? — Jaco Pastorius
I'd have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I'd just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary. — Bobby Seale
When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people. — John Coltrane
You don't decide you're hip. It just happens that way. — Cannonball Adderley
Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires. — Wynton Marsalis
They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. — Charlie Parker
Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. — Charlie Parker
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