Jazz music Quotes · Page 6

I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.

— Nina Simone

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

— Charles Mingus

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

— Pharoah Sanders

I compulsively reach for perfection in music, often at the expense of everything else in my life.

— Stan Getz

Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once.

— John Coltrane

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

— Miroslav Vitous

Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

— Colin Greenwood

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case & throw in a piece of raw meat.

— Wes Montgomery

I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently…

— Miles Davis

I used to try to play like [Miles Davis], and Miles caught me copying him one night at Birdland. He said, 'Hey…

— Freddie Hubbard

All music now, I think, is fair game for jazz musicians to interpret, and they have been. I would consider those songs…

— Patricia Barber

I would like to be a scholar in whatever I do, a scholar is never finished, he is always seeking and I…

— Ahmad Jamal

In classical music, love is based on bitin' -- imitation. It's not based on interpretation. A jazz musician, if he plays someone…

— Todd Boyd

Ornette Coleman is doing the only really new thing in jazz since the innovations in the mid-forties of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker,…

— John Lewis

Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It's conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as…

— Wynton Marsalis

[Jazz] is a music of freedom and wonder. It's our indigenous art form, and I'm still blessed to travel around the world…

— Charles Lloyd

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

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 have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been…

— Sonny Rollins

I'm not a jazz musician, because, I mean, firstly, I can't play anything. I'm not bad on the tamborine. I have a…

— Michael Buble

But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about…

— Wynton Marsalis

I never really sounded like Bird, but that was my mission. I didn't care if people said that I copied him; I…

— Jackie McLean

I was going to say is that I come from a rock background, but also I was super interested in jazz for…

— Jherek Bischoff

When I got this saxophone, it became a religion. There wasn't TV, there wasn't much money, and there was just a real…

— Stan Getz

One thing I like about jazz, kid, is that I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?

— Bix Beiderbecke

My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

— Sarah Vaughan

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

— Fred Durst

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

— Jelly Roll Morton

Music is my religion. Music is the only thing that has never failed me. People let you down, music won't.

— Gary Bartz

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

— John Coltrane

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

— Jon Stewart

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.

— Duke Ellington

I am viewed as the Negro who has gone outside of the categories assigned to me.

— Anthony Braxton

I'm trying to make music a sensual expression, not an academic experiment.

— Andrew Hill

I was talented but crazy, semi-autistic and eccentric.

— Andrew Hill

You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

— Miles Davis

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

— Jelly Roll Morton

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.

— Bobby Hutcherson

Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

— Maynard Ferguson

Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.

— Johnny Griffin