Jazz Quotes · Page 7

[Bebop is] Chinese music.

— Louis Armstrong

I don't dig that two-beat jive the New Orleans cats play. My boys and I have to have four heavy beats to…

— Count Basie

[On John Tunnard:] One day a marvelous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat walked into the gallery. He looked a little…

— Peggy Guggenheim

It's one thing to just play a tune, or play a program of music, but it's another thing to practically create a…

— Chick Corea

The qualities in music which I considered most important - and still do - were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity.

— Paul Desmond

What is my definition of jazz? "Safe sex of the highest order."

— Kurt Vonnegut

There is a view that jazz is 'evil' because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street…

— Garth Hudson

The one radio voice that I listened to above others belonged to Ella Fitzgerald. There was a quality to her voice that…

— Doris Day

That's kinda what happened to me: I listened to jazz, country, R&B, rock 'n' roll. And when I sat down to write…

— J. J. Cale

I'm not a big jazz fan.

— Warren Zevon

Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.

— Paul Whiteman

Tastes are created by the business interests. How else can you explain the popularity of Al Hirt?

— Charles Mingus

To me, jazz is the closest thing to insanity that there is in music.

— Anonymous

A note can be as small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

— Thelonious Monk

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can…

— Serj Tankian

Armstrong was the key creator of the mature working language of jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of…

— Anonymous

In college, I was able to be the vocalist for the jazz band at Arkansas State.

— Ashley McBryde

I love so many different types of music - hard rock, bebop, jazz fusion, R&B. And I've loved meeting and painting so…

— Peter Max

If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music.

— Charles Mingus

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the…

— Alan Lomax

Bebop has set music back twenty years.

— Tommy Dorsey

I used to be just a total jazz freak. People used to say, 'Where's the melody? Is there a melody in there…

— Glen Campbell

“That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right mind would point at this thing and say,…

— Nathan Reese Maher

I think the challenges for me was to go into the studio with these incredible jazz players and come up to their…

— Rita Coolidge

I've played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then…

— Miles Teller