Jazz Quotes · Page 18

Blues and jazz is our American music.

— Leslie Uggams

Kenny Burrell is the grand master of jazz guitar.

— Dizzy Gillespie

It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.

— Art Blakey

I think jazz is a wonderful learning tool.

— John Otto

Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.

— Wynton Marsalis

Jazz is restless. It won't stay put & it never will.

— J. J. Johnson

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

— Louis Armstrong

My foundation is jazz. I do all the things jazz musicians do.

— Dianne Reeves

Dizzy used to tell me I'm playing too hard. He'd say to not give everything. Miles told me that too.

— Freddie Hubbard

Salsa, classic rock, soul music, jazz... all of that was a part of my education in making hip-hop music.

— Aloe Blacc

If everyone liked what I did, I probably wouldn't be playing anything of depth.

— Joshua Redman

Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

— Kurt Vonnegut

Can anybody be given creativity? No. Only equipment to develop it if it's in them in the first place.

— George Shearing

It's a mystery to me why everybody doesn't love jazz. I've never been able to figure that out.

— Walter Becker

Jazz today, as always in the past, is a matter of thoughtful creation, not mere unaided instinct.

— Duke Ellington

We want to show how hip-hop, which kind of fuels today's basketball stars, is directly related to jazz.

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

I love singing jazz. I don't like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else.…

— Jessye Norman

As a singer, I've been criticized for sounding feminine. They say I don't belong in any category, male or female, pop or…

— Jimmy Scott

My years of ballet and jazz dance lessons didn't make me any more graceful - they just helped keep me from bumping…

— Toni Tennille

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of…

— Alexis Korner

“In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue…

— Ted Gioia

Nobody has ever been able to define Jazz satisfactorily. This is probably because anyone who was capable of doing so never really…

— Mary Kingsley

I think we've all had enough of Coltrane saxophonists. There's a case of someone ruining a generation of saxophonists, as Louis Armstrong…

— Paul Bley

The talking shows are like free jazz. I'm just gonna go out there and blow with the idea of keeping it streamlined…

— Henry Rollins

Of course when you are a kid you listen to what your parents had around. A lot of gospel, jazz. Now when…

— Jorma Kaukonen

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's…

— Pat Metheny

I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music…

— Robert Greene

The hardest thing about being a young musician on the jazz scene is that there are so many styles of music, jazz…

— Dave Kikoski

Jazz is not a game of chance. Its sonorous disorder is only an appearance. It is an organized force obeying obscure laws,…

— Wanda Landowska

Jazz is really about the human experience. It’s about the ability of human beings to take the worst of circumstances and struggles…

— Herbie Hancock

Liz [Gillies] doesn't really listen to anything new, besides Adele, Ariana Grande, and stuff like that. She loves '70s music and old…

— Denis Leary

I don't get pat down, you know what's on the waist, I don't mean Jazz when I say I "count base." Fly…

— Sheek Louch

There's a jazz influence in my music in general.

— Alexandre Desplat

The true artform is being a human being.

— Herbie Hancock

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.

— Ray Brown

Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

— Miles Davis

Science teachers and the mentally ill, that's all Jazz is for.

— Noel Fielding

I am a musician, but I'm another type of musician.

— Sun Ra

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.

— Percy Heath

Jazz is a racist musical form invented by whites to enslave blacks.

— Lyndon LaRouche