Jazz Quotes · Page 39

Diana Krall knocks me out. I like jazz and I like her simple approach.

— Merle Haggard

I understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

— Van Morrison

I like to say I listened to three genres of music growing up: classical, jazz and Taylor Swift.

— Laufey

Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.

— Nigel Kennedy

I'm not much on gimmicks. I never have been because they don't last.

— Billy Eckstine

If I'm not saying it in four choruses or less, then I'm not saying it.

— Milt Jackson

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

— Louis Armstrong

Jazz is something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

— Ray Brown

My life has always been my music, it's always come first, but the music ain't worth nothing if you can't lay it…

— Louis Armstrong

Taxi drivers used to ask me what kind of music I did, and I'd say, 'Well, it's kind of jazz, soul, classical'…

— Laura Mvula

I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go…

— Taylor Sheridan

I was sometimes doing DJ stuff and working in a record shop in Tokyo. That place was a very unique shop. It…

— Miho Hatori

I was 16 years old, and I was just flailing around, looking for an interest. I heard, you know, these jazz records.…

— Harvey Pekar

As a drumset player I look outside the typical canon of drums - jazz and rock. When I hear something like the…

— Glenn Kotche

Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed…

— Sonny Rollins

I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his…

— Molly Ringwald

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting…

— Wynton Marsalis

“Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city’s most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre…

— Jeffrey H. Jackson

Recording in Nashville was absolutely essential to get the sound, the musicians, the atmosphere, the warmth... There are just cult places like…

— Roch Voisine

“I started going to jazz clubs in New York when I was twelve or thirteen, first with my older cousins Mike and…

— Donald Fagen

I believe in knowing all you can about the music and the people who made the music. I think it's much more…

— Sonny Sharrock

Something special can happen late at night in a jazz club. As the crowd thins, the musicians intuitively sense that those few…

— Patricia Barber

I visited New York in '63, intending to move there, but I noticed that what I valued about jazz was being discarded.…

— Joe Sample

There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there,…

— Donald Miller

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

— Charles Mingus

Well I went to New Orleans to cover the jazz festival for Trio, it's this new arts channel, it's really great.

— Amy Sedaris

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can't not be a musician.

— Debbie Davies

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

— Pharoah Sanders

I listen to Neil Young and jazz and classical stations and, if my girlfriend's driving, it tends to be Hall & Oates.

— Anonymous

Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.

— Christina Aguilera

All the folks I play with come from jazz backgrounds or at least appreciate spontaneity within the parameters of a pop song.

— Andrew Bird

I've never listened to jazz. It's just not something I ever paid attention to.

— Oprah Winfrey

I can count on one hand the number of instrumental hits there have been over the last 10 years.

— Chuck Mangione

Smokin' at the Half Note is the absolute greatest jazz-guitar album ever made. It is also the record that taught me how…

— Pat Metheny

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

— Alice Walker

There's a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.

— Sarah Vaughan

I'm always looking for ways to develop as an artist, especially as a jazz artist-to find different ways of testing my voice.

— Cassandra Wilson

As a rule, my focus is on classical music, but I love jazz. I love everything, actually.

— Julie Andrews

I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by…

— Ernest Gaines

I think that drummers have come a long way, but they haven't forgotten players like Gene Krupa, or the other jazz players.

— Bill Ward