Jazz Music Quotes

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations. ~ Anais Nin

Other than conversation, no other art form can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction like Jazz. ~ Stan Getz

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music. ~ Toots Thielemans

Jazz music will continue to thrive, possibly in unexpected ways. ~ Pat Metheny

Jazz music celebrates life! Human life; the range of it, the absurdity of it, the ignorance of it, the greatness of it, the intelligence of it, the sexuality of it, the profundity of it. And it deals with it. In all of its ... It deals with it! ~ Wynton Marsalis

I believe that regardless of how many people you've listened to or emulated over the years, your sound is you and what you really feel inside. ~ Clark Terry

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. ~ Stan Getz

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz. ~ Marc Ribot

English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was the music from the streets. ~ Yann Martel

Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz. ~ Sonny Rollins

I really love jazz, but I will never be a jazz musician as much as I dream. But, I think that the jazz music I love is there in my music. ~ Laura Mvula

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains. ~ Paul Whiteman

The iconoclastic mode, that specific mode of language, there is an element of it that it is punk - that is confrontational. That's just a part of the language of jazz - at a certain point. ~ Matthew Shipp

I played Big Band jazz music. I wasn't into rock and roll. I was just there because it was a living. I surprised everyone. I'm still surprising people. ~ Bobby Vinton

Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two great American institutions. ~ Henry Rollins

I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves. ~ Sonny Rollins

If you don't already know about jazz music, how would you be exposed? How would get an opportunity to find out if it spoke to you? If you get exposed to it enough, you might find a taste for it. ~ Esperanza Spalding

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music. ~ Wynton Marsalis

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. ~ Miles Davis

I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then. ~ Miles Teller

I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was. ~ Paul Desmond

I wanted to play some more grown-up music - jazz. ~ Rick Derringer

Jazz is the folk music of the machine age. ~ Paul Whiteman

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies. ~ Albert Murray

I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway. ~ Evan Parker

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time. ~ Wynton Marsalis

Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days. ~ Evan Parker

I think that's what really a substantial work is, it's forever. It's the truth now and it was the truth then, and it will be the truth tomorrow. ~ Abbey Lincoln

Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me. ~ Esperanza Spalding

Louis Armstrong was the primary contributor to jazz music in the 20th century. His improvisational skills served as the principal model for all who came after him, regardless of one's chosen instrument. ~ Ellis Marsalis, Jr.

I started to play Jazz music in my early teens. A boyfriend brought records over, so I listened to everything ~ Marian McPartland

If you're making money people don't think you're playing Jazz. When you're not making money they think you're a great Jazz musician. ~ Pete Fountain

He [Benny Carter] is all that every jazz musician the world over wants to be. He's performed 20,000 nights. How many shoes have been shined? How much mascara put on? Rouge? How many of those impossible bowties have been tied? How many love songs have been sung? How many dances have been danced? How many have passed to the sound of his music? It's been said that a man should not be forced to live up to his art. Benny Carter is one of the rare instances when we wonder whether the great art that a man has created can live up to him. ~ Wynton Marsalis

I love jazz music and sad music. ~ Fred Durst

Jazz music is the power of now. ~ Wynton Marsalis

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

Jazz music and, more specifically, jazz musicians, are my artistic heroes. I want to be the Thelonious Monk of acting. He had no concern for how well he was received. He played whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. He just wasn't interested in achieving the good opinion of his audience. That's the Holy Grail of acting; of any art form. ~ Trevor St. John

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

I'm saddened to see that everyone's pitched out the baby with the bath, in that we say that it can't be one or the other, it could be both. I mean, just because we listen to classical music doesn't mean that we can't listen to jazz. ~ Don Bluth

I'd love to see a Nirvana biopic. I loved them when I was younger. I really like jazz music, so I'd like to see a Billie Holiday biopic - she was a fascinating woman. ~ Antonia Thomas

Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion. ~ Christina Aguilera

Jazz musicians are the coolest people on the planet. Can I have some cool? ~ Jon Stewart

If I knew what it was going to look like, I wouldnt be so excited to be a part of it. Jazz is a music of surprise; its a music of spontaneity. I think jazz musicians live
I know I do
for being surprised and not knowing whats going to come next. ~ Joshua Redman

What kills me is that everybody thinks I like Jazz. ~ Samuel L. Jackson

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm. ~ Jelly Roll Morton

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened. ~ Donald Miller

This is so nice, it must be illegal. ~ Fats Waller

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

I grew up in a home filled with music and had an early appreciation of jazz since my dad was a jazz musician. Beginning at around age three I started singing with his band and jazz music has continued to be one of my three passions along with acting and writing. I like to say jazz music is my musical equivalent of comfort food. It's always where I go back to when I want to feel grounded, ~ Molly Ringwald

The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much. ~ Don DeLillo

The sound of the wind stretches its limbs.
The jazz music witholds some of its ruckus.
Hands move something in the dark.
I say: just an old romanticism...
No matter, the place will fit everything.

Vision descends upon flaccid pathways
and rides them on cheap metal.
Dried out trees and others take their water
from the drowned sand by force.
I say: a passing depression.
No matter, the place will fit everything.
During the day the sun approaches the mountain,
places its hand upon it,
its cold hand of lovers,
strikes stone with stone.
Mountain scrub dances behind the stone.
The sun does not see it.
Only the moon shines upon it all the way beyond the bend
and the guardian stones watch from afar.
I say: a passing coincidence.
No matter, the place will fit everything. ~ Ashur Etwebi

Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere! ~ Joe Lovano

All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz. ~ Terry Teachout

Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful. ~ Jesse Stone

I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz. ~ Terry Teachout

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know. ~ Louis Armstrong

I may be prejudiced, but I believe that jazz music has the strongest healing potential, and it's not just because I play it and love it so much. I feel that it's the improvisation in jazz that makes it so strong as a healing tool, what each individual gives to a tune from their heart and their soul when they take a solo. It's all spontaneous, and it's all love, and from the heart. ~ Horace Silver

The only art form that Americans have created that's recognized around the world is jazz music born in a community that had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land. ~ Ken Burns

Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz. ~ Wynton Marsalis

If you met my dad, I think a lot of things would be put to rest. Because my pops is a pretty silly guy. But, Coldcut, they're based in the U.K. I'm a big fan of jazz music, so American music has had a big influence on what I listen to. ~ Eric San

I love more percussions more than anything. I always wanted to be a drummer. ~ Pharoah Sanders

To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question! ~ Louis Armstrong

Sometimes there are no gigs, but the main thing is the music. You can't take that away. The only person who can take that away from you is you. ~ Mike Stern

The people in Japan love jazz music, man, and also in Europe, far more than they ever did here. And that always puzzled me until I went over there to really get into it for myself and find out what it is. It's their tradition and culture, man. We've gotten away from that in America, man. We live in a country of complete fantasy. ~ Milt Jackson

Our basic audience begins with creaking elderly types of twenty-three and above. ~ Paul Desmond

Just because I'm playing Jazz I don't forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through Jazz. ~ Charles Mingus

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it! ~ Art Tatum

I can play, and I know it; I'm not looking for any pats on the back. I don't have to be endorsed by anybody. I make enough to live and eat, and I'm happy with my music-and that's all I need. ~ Curtis Fuller

Judy Garland was the singer I most wanted to sound like then, not to copy, but to get some of her soul and purity. A wonderful young voice. ~ Sarah Vaughan

I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock ... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz. ~ Jimmy Page

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

The way that I got involved with microtonal music was, frankly, through jazz. ~ John Eaton

I also like Western classical music and jazz. ~ Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz. ~ Robert Wyatt

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

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

People will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand ... That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town. ~ Miles Davis

I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards – Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin. ~ Zooey Deschanel

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

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

I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy. ~ Fred Durst

I went to Juilliard in New York and used to do cabarets just for fun. Occasionally, I would get together with a jazz musician and play at a restaurant for cash. And I've done some background vocals for recording artists. ~ Nicole Beharie

In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them - sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been "down the line," as the song puts it, know what this music is about…. White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word "sensual" is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous here, either. ~ James Baldwin

He didn't say nothing. He would just do things. He never said nothing or explained nothing. He just would do it and that was it. You were on your own. You had to be very independent being around John [Coltrane]. ~ Pharoah Sanders

Shug say, What, too shamefaced to put singing and dancing and fucking together? She laugh. That's the reason they call what us sing the devil's music. Devils love to fuck. ~ Alice Walker

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance. ~ Francoise Sagan

Once the jazz musician learns all the fundamentals they can keep track of a lot of choices in an instant. ~ Sheena Iyengar

Music is always for the listener, but the first listener is always the musician ~ Wynton Marsalis

I am an improviser, ... I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised. ~ Joe Zawinul

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

I like to say, jazz music is kind of like my musical equivalent of comfort food. You know, it's always where I go back to when I just want to feel sort of grounded. ~ Molly Ringwald

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That's a little bit too much. ~ Miles Davis

We don't live in a jazz world, unfortunately. I think if I had lived in a jazz world, I would have done OK. I'm not sure I would have done great. I'm a lover of jazz music, so I would have been happy, don't get me wrong. I go to jazz concerts like the biggest jazz fan in world. The drag is that I don't play jazz for a living. ~ George Benson

I wanted to put jazz on the record, all the loves of music that I had on the record, so I could show people I was ahead of my 19 years. It may have been over the heads of some people. ~ Brian McKnight

In America, music was the first sphere of social interaction in which racial barriers were challenged and overturned. And the challenge went both ways: by the mid-1920s, white bands were playing for all-black audiences at Lincoln Theater and elsewhere. These intermediate steps between segregation and integration represented, for all their problems, progress of sorts. ~ Ted Gioia

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad. ~ John Coltrane

My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it. ~ Neil Young

It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing. ~ Pat Metheny

Everything-everything-was communicated through the sound of the music. There were no other signals of any kind ever-no count-offs, head nods, spoken instructions ... nothing. ~ Chuck Israels

I'd listened to [Ornette Coleman] all kinds of ways. I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober. I even played with him. I think he's jiving baby. ~ Roy Eldridge