Jazz music Quotes · Page 5

Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me.

— Albert Ayler

Composing is improvisation slowed down.

— Wayne Shorter

Jazz washes away the dust of every day life.

— Art Blakey

Man, that cat [Ornette Coleman] is nuts.

— Thelonious Monk

They tell me Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

— Edgar Wilson Nye

Women and rhythm-section first!?

— Jaco Pastorius

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

— Miles Davis

[Jazz musicians] couldn't cut rock. I had to be more limited and specific about what I was doing.

— Van Morrison

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

— Kurt Rosenwinkel

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

— Sheena Iyengar

Today Jazz music is performed & listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages & creeds.

— Michelle Obama

Many jazz artists go to L.A. seeking a more comfortable life and then they really stop playing.

— Sonny Rollins

My mom would have liked it that I patterned myself more after Jimmy Reed.

— Anonymous

If you hit a wrong note, then make it right by what you play afterward.

— Joe Pass

Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big…

— Darryl Pinckney

That.s what Jazz music is all about.We started the Messengers because somebody had to mind the store for jazz.No America--no Jazz. It…

— Art Blakey

Louis Armstrong was the primary contributor to jazz music in the 20th century. His improvisational skills served as the principal model for…

— Ellis Marsalis, Jr

I love music. My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or…

— Gaspard Ulliel

I think that band [Glenn Miller] was the beginning of the end. It was a mechanized version of what they called jazz…

— Artie Shaw

You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had…

— Sonny Rollins

I think all record companies should be run by a musician. Just as you wouldn't trust your health to an electrician.

— Paul Bley

That's a skill that I'm proud of: to be able to be a jazz musician and go a bit crazy sometimes and…

— Robert Glasper

Music needs the juxtaposition of opposites to achieve its drama, so harshness and dissonance are simply part of the material a musician…

— Chuck Israels

Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your…

— Glenn Ligon

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and…

— Anais Nin

[Lee Morgan] was the only young cat that scared me when he played. He had so much fire and natural feeling. I…

— Freddie Hubbard

Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints…

— Jesse Stone

Many jazz musicians affect a misunderstood-genius air when they play, which alienates the audience and breaks down the communications of the music.…

— Gabor Szabo

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard…

— John Coltrane

The Beatles came and everybody forgot about everything else. That was a friendly, together, hip interpersonal music, introducing electric sustain, and it…

— Paul Bley

Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat.

— Carmen McRae

“Deliverance is to the Bible what jazz music is to Mardi Gras: bold, brassy, and everywhere.”

— Max Lucado

Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost.

— Albert Ayler

I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.

— Thelonious Monk

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be Jazz.

— Lee Konitz

I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini.

— Paul Desmond

[Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.

— Miles Davis

Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not…

— Nina Simone

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

— Ornette Coleman

If you don't like Louis Armstrong, you don't know how to love.

— Mahalia Jackson