Jazz Music Quotes: best 122 famous quotes about Jazz Music

Top Jazz Music Quotes

Browse top 122 famous quotes and sayings about Jazz Music by most favorite authors.

Favorite Jazz Music Quotes

1. "Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations."
Author: Anaïs Nin

2. "Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa."
Author: Art Blakey

3. "Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history."
Author: August Wilson

4. "Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions."
Author: Barbara Januszkiewicz

5. "Jazz vision is the fusion of music and art a real paradox of same-yet different. Here we play in exchanges, like the hardness of the key of c# major and from the softness of Db major - capturing, reflecting and improvising."
Author: Barbara Januszkiewicz

6. "You know I want to sing for people, I want to jazz people up I want to make new music that they've never heard."
Author: Casey Abrams

7. "Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians."
Author: Colin Greenwood

8. "Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians."
Author: Dave Brubeck

9. "In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about."
Author: David Amram

10. "I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last."
Author: David Amram

11. "Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it."
Author: David Sanborn

12. "I think 'Horace Silver' was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of 'Horace Silver.'"
Author: David Sanborn

13. "Jazz to me is a living music. It's a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people."
Author: Dexter Gordon

14. "And more than anything, I like the improvisation of jazz. That's the same thing with DJ-ing. There's so much improvisation you can do with cuttin' and scratchin' that's reminiscent of jazz music, because it's all about how you feel. You're capturing a vibe and just going with it."
Author: DJ Jazzy Jeff

15. "Think of the jazz improv artist responding to the musical banter among her fellow players onstage. Aside from whatever training they've done in advance, as soon as the curtain opens, they move into unknown territory together, creating something new each time by remaining in a state of undivided presence."
Author: Donna Quesada

16. "I love music, and a lot of it. Jazz is probably on the top with guys like Miles Davis. But I even enjoy music from the '60s and '70s."
Author: Donovan Bailey

17. "Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea."
Author: Eberhard Weber

18. "If you met my dad, I think a lot of things would be put to rest. Because my pops is a pretty silly guy. But, Coldcut, they're based in the U.K. I'm a big fan of jazz music, so American music has had a big influence on what I listen to."
Author: Eric San

19. "Jazz. Here in Germany it become something worse than a virus. We was all of us damn fleas, us Negroes and Jews and low-life hoodlums, set on playing that vulgar racket, seducing sweet blond kids into corruption and sex. It was a plague sent out by the dread black hordes, engineered by the Jews. Us Negroes, see, we was only half to blame - we just can't help it. Savages just got a natural feel for filthy rhythms, no self-control to speak of. But the Jews, brother, now they cooked up this jungle music on purpose. All part of their master plan to weaken Aryan youth, corrupt its janes, dilute its bloodlines."
Author: Esi Edugyan

20. "Ho capito in quell'istante di essere veramente innamorato, ma nel senso della parola inglese: in love. Forse non eravamo nemmeno due persone innamorate l'una dell'altra ma innamorate di ciò che ci univa. Come due musicisti jazz: ciò che li unisce non è l'amore dell'uno per l'altro, ma l'amore che entrambi hanno per la musica. Ciò che creano."
Author: Fabio Volo

21. "My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented!"
Author: Gaspard Ulliel

22. "If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music."
Author: Ginger Baker

23. "Hamp would ask me about tempos in the band: 'Jacquet,' he'd say, 'knock off that tempo.' A lot of jazz musicians didn't prefer to play for dancers, which was their loss, really. But good jazz has always had that dance feel."
Author: Illinois Jacquet

24. "Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it."
Author: John Corigliano

25. "I've been informed by both sides, jazz, western music, Asian music, African music, all sides, because I've been interested in the sound of the universe, and that sound is without limit."
Author: Joseph Jarman

26. "If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music."
Author: Lee Ritenour

27. "Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz."
Author: Marc Ribot

28. "In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form."
Author: Mike Figgis

29. "If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, "regardless whether we want to hear it", it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying."
Author: Milan Kundera

30. "I like to say, jazz music is kind of like my musical equivalent of comfort food. You know, it's always where I go back to when I just want to feel sort of grounded."
Author: Molly Ringwald

31. "I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie."
Author: Molly Ringwald

32. "Mum left school at 15, and after a few years of modelling and dating jazz musicians, was married by 21 to my father, Mike Taylor, a journalist on the 'Daily Mirror.' They had my brother and me pretty quickly and had split up by the time I was two. I don't really have any memories of them as a couple."
Author: Natascha McElhone

33. "I went to Juilliard in New York and used to do cabarets just for fun. Occasionally, I would get together with a jazz musician and play at a restaurant for cash. And I've done some background vocals for recording artists."
Author: Nicole Beharie

34. "Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time."
Author: Ornette Coleman

35. "Jazz is the folk music of the machine age."
Author: Paul Whiteman

36. "Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear."
Author: Ralph Ellison

37. "I didn't plan on rock-n-roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock-n-roll with jazz, and I thought I could make some money playing music."
Author: Robby Krieger

38. "Everybody's not going to like jazz, let's just be honest about it. Everybody doesn't like everything. There's a disconnect in generations and some people just aren't going to feel that music."
Author: Robert Glasper

39. "Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old."
Author: Robert Glasper

40. "In a conversation with the master jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Wynton Marsalis, he told me, "You need to have some restrictions in jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that's not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise." The ability to improvise, he said, comes from fundamental knowledge, and this knowledge "limits the choices you can make and will make"
Author: Sheena Iyengar

41. "I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs."
Author: Sonny Rollins

42. "Europeans really provided many venues over there and hailed the jazz artists, and a lot of musicians went over there and stayed over there for a long time. A lot of them moved over there, lived over there, and died over there."
Author: Sonny Rollins

43. "There are more guys than girls in jazz.Next-to-no lady trumpeters (oh, there are a few)but it doesn't matter because, for me, jazz trumpet is all about one guyMiles Davis.He made this famous album in 1959called Kind of Bluewhich is kind of, always,how I feel.That album gets into your bonesgoes and goesstarts, hesitates, reaches out, feelsfor the music, the sound, the thing you want to change.Always grasping for the unattainable makes youkind of excited,kind of sorry."
Author: Stasia Ward Kehoe

44. "Jazz is people's music, a collectivity."
Author: Steve Lacy

45. "Jazz music and, more specifically, jazz musicians, are my artistic heroes. I want to be the Thelonious Monk of acting. He had no concern for how well he was received. He played whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. He just wasn't interested in achieving the good opinion of his audience. That's the Holy Grail of acting; of any art form."
Author: Trevor St. John

46. "Now I shall speak of evil as none hasSpoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;The white-hosed moron torturing a blackBull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds, and sharks."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

47. "Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music."
Author: Wynton Marsalis

48. "Jazz is democracy in music."
Author: Wynton Marsalis

49. "Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship the tape somewhere. Well, none of the musicians have played together. You can't play jazz music that way. In order for you to play jazz, you've got to listen to them. The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking and for you to interact with them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out. And that's how our music really could teach what the meaning of American democracy is."
Author: Wynton Marsalis

50. "Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also."
Author: Yo Yo Ma

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