Jazz Quotes

1344 Jazz quotes by 630 unique authors

In high school, I was always into Jerry Lee Lewis, and they decided they needed a piano player for the jazz band. I had my… — Nellie McKay
In high school, during lunchtime I would go in the room where the wrestling mats were and try different flips and different moves. Like windmills.… — Caity Lotz
Jazz is an art that takes decades to appreciate and understand. — Jake Shimabukuro
Around age 11 or 12, I started playing jazz bass. From there, I went to electric bass and then guitar, which I kept up for… — Joshua Roman
I grew up playing the saxophone. I joined the jazz band in high school, but somewhere along the way I realized the guys who strummed… — Chris Carmack
From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a… — Athol Fugard
As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people… — Wynton Marsalis
One of the most important functions of jazz has been to encourage a hope for freedom, for people living in situations of intolerance or struggle. — Herbie Hancock
Cicadas, buckling and unbuckling their stomach muscles, yield the sound of someone sharpening scissors. Fall field crickets, the thermometer hounds, add high-pitched tinkling chirps to… — Diane Ackerman
Grover Washington was my main influence, and when I went to college, I started listening to more of the jazz masters like Sonny Rollins, Cannonball… — Kenny G
My favorite band of all time is The Clash. The thing I love about The Clash is they started out as guys who could barely… — Michael Franti
The No. 1 best-selling Christmas album of all time is from Kenneth Bruce Gorelick, the Jewish smooth-jazz legend Kenny G. American Jews have always produced… — Matisyahu
The way jazz works is that we take a theme, and then we write using the same structure, same chord changes, and then we can… — Tommy Chong
I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully. — Andre Previn
I was an absolute idiot, wearing polo-necks, reading Kerouac, watching Woody Allen movies, and jazz fitted right into all of that. My interest in that… — Jamie Cullum
Oh, I was a real Nirvana kid. I got into jazz because I listened to a lot of metal, Megadeth and that, and those guys… — Jamie Cullum
Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two… — Henry Rollins
For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement. — Henry Rollins
Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular… — Albert Murray
A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of… — Albert Murray
The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected… — Albert Murray
One of my songs was on a jazz station for awhile. It was a song that I wrote for a jazz sax player friend of… — Trevor Donovan
I read every book there was on jazz, about the original players - King Oliver, Buddy Bolden and all those groups. At one time I… — Clint Eastwood
If you consider film an art form, as some people do, then the Western would be a truly American art form, much as jazz is. — Clint Eastwood
Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom! — Christian Scott

Who Wrote These Jazz Quotes

630 authors contributed a total of 1,344 Jazz Quotes, led by these top contributors: