Jazz Quotes · Page 33

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

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

— Lionel Hampton

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

— Kenny Beats

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

— Jimi Hendrix

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

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

— Pat Metheny

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

— Donald Fagen

I really enjoy going out with my jazz group. That's something that I don't ever want to stop doing.

— Dianne Reeves

Dave Rocha is a mature and eminently musical improviser. His sumptuous tone and cafefully chosen notes embody real musical thought. His performance…

— Frank Hanny

Paris, the City of Light, never fails to enchant. With its jazz clubs, music in the streets, outdoor restaurants. The clatter of…

— Carol Drinkwater

In 1962 I wrote for 'Jazz News,' using the pseudonym Manfred Manne, which I picked because of a jazz drummer with that…

— Manfred Mann

I always tell people, it took me 10 minutes and 35 years in the business. I get tired of playing it ["Lullaby…

— George Shearing

People comment on the way that I phrase. And in my 20s, I realized, my phrasing is jazz phrasing. I don't comply…

— Brian Stokes Mitchell

As a child brought up in Paris, I dreamed of America, that lost world my parents had left behind - it was…

— Alexandre Desplat

As far as being a 'player's player,' you've only got to go to Nashville or Argentina and you can forget about it.…

— Mark Knopfler

I'm interested in music, not in my image. If someone plays something fantastic, that I could never have thought of, it makes…

— Ornette Coleman

One of the most obvious aspects of the music to people who know jazz is: How does it feel in the swing?…

— Chuck Israels

Duke Ellington's career traces the entire history of jazz. The repertoire associated with him contains the most important elements in the music…

— Billy Taylor

America's the great conundrum and the great dream and the great fascination: the new land, the new world, the new temple, the…

— Anne Waldman

To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz…

— Randy Sandke

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel,…

— Wynton Marsalis

“I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands…

— Nathan Reese Maher

They put on fresh gloves and got back to business. Jazz wiped up the blood splatters in the freezer and tossed the…

— Barry Lyga

“In America, music was the first sphere of social interaction in which racial barriers were challenged and overturned. And the challenge went…

— Ted Gioia

I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners…

— Norman Granz

Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.

— Barbara Januszkiewicz

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.

— David Sanborn

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the…

— Buddy Rich

Jazz has provided the framework for all the other stuff that I've done.

— Lizz Wright

A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?

— Robert Glasper

I like the idea of an eclectic approach, incorporating jazz with other forms and other genres of music.

— Herbie Hancock

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

— Jim Coleman

Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.

— Miles Davis

“Butterfly upon my hand, A voice of wonder within my mind, not my own but the butterfly's.”

— Jazz Feylynn

Sounds of daily life are musical. I try to absorb the intricacies of sounds as if I were listening to music.

— Tom Harrell

the grace is being able to like rock music, symphony music, jazz … anything that contains the original energy of joy.

— Charles Bukowski

In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I’m very much a jazz poet.

— Jayne Cortez

Well, I guess my unease with that is... I'm always a little uneasy with that phrase - smooth jazz, as opposed to…

— David Sanborn

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

— Nina Simone

I think jazz and comic books are probably the two uniquely American art forms.

— Len Wein