Jazz Quotes · Page 52

...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

— Pat Metheny

Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by…

— Ralph Ellison

I like seeing someone that can sing jazz and then flip over and sing a pop song and then sing a rock…

— Sara Bareilles

“These babies ain’t just guitars; these babies are living, breathing instruments.”

— Brenda Sutton Rose

Jazz flute's funny. And I'm a big Latin music fan, Tito Puente, Tina Cruz, all that stuff.

— Genndy Tartakovsky

Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise... but a way of life.

— Lester Bowie

Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.

— Cornel West

Some people think I'm a rock 'n' roll musician and some think I'm a jazz musician but, for me, there is no…

— Georgie Fame

Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be…

— Bill Laswell

You see, pops, that's the kind of talk that's ruining the music. Everyone's trying to do something new, no one trying to…

— Louis Armstrong

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz…

— Wynton Marsalis

We get along, we talk music.Lenny Kravitz took me to Harlem to see this little jazz show in the back of a…

— Penn Dayton Badgley

When pop and rock were taking over from jazz, and Sinatra was covering a Beatles song, it was all very new. I…

— Michael Buble

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

— Yo-Yo Ma

I listened to a lot of Amy Winehouse: her albums 'Frank' and 'Back to Black'. She was such an incredible artist. She…

— Daya

[John Coltrane] liked my qualities as a person and that's the reason why he let me play with him. It wasn't what…

— Pharoah Sanders

When I was young, I never bought records because my brother Joseph played saxophone and had a record player. I loved listening…

— Miriam Makeba

His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering…

— Gunther Schuller

For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest,…

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Comedy is the drug, when they laugh it's like I'm a jazz musician and they hear it, and they get it. It's…

— Alonzo Bodden

I was an absolute idiot, wearing polo-necks, reading Kerouac, watching Woody Allen movies, and jazz fitted right into all of that. My…

— Jamie Cullum

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially…

— Albert Murray

I grew up listening to Switchfoot. I love Switchfoot; they're a great band. John Foreman is awesome. I really dig mainstream pop…

— Shane Harper

One ironic thing is that although (the Soviet Union) was one of the most oppressive systems, with no respect for the individual,…

— Gabe Polsky

Anyone who understands Jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's what's so simple about it.

— Yogi Berra

I grew up in a jazz household. They made me listen to jazz before I could hear my Motown.

— Jeffrey Osborne

Sometimes when we're flying or in the hotel, I might run over songs, or in the bathroom.

— Ella Fitzgerald

I came from an era when we didn't use electronic instruments. The bass wasn't even amplified. The sound was the sound you…

— Stan Getz

“Do not even suggest jazz. I saw Newsies and was traumatized for, like, five years.”

— Richelle Mead

I'm not going to play funk licks on a jazz album. That makes no sense.

— Branford Marsalis

Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life.

— Kevin Young

All art is communication of the artists' ideas, sounds, thoughts; without that no one will support the artist.

— Lionel Hampton

What I'm dealing with is so vast and great that it can't be called the truth. It's above the truth.

— Sun Ra

I want to play music that draws a picture of the world and its space.

— Jimi Hendrix

I am friends with the most amazing musicians that can do pop, rap, punk and jazz.

— Kenny Beats

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

— Pat Metheny

I didn't really grow up on hip-hop. Ella Fitzgerald and the old school jazz divas are more my comfort zone.

— Gugu Mbatha-Raw

As jazz fans, it was amusing for us to play jazz harmonies on these big, ugly electric guitars.

— Donald Fagen

We are serious about our music here in Philadelphia, and jazz has meant a lot to this city.

— Michael Nutter

I'm a person of change and I must be honest to my artistry and my creativity. That's part of the word 'jazz'...…

— Maynard Ferguson