Top 80 Jazz Quotes

Jazz is a racist musical form invented by whites to enslave blacks.

When I started recording, I thought I’d be able to do all kinds of records: jazz, country, dance – and I’ve always wanted to do a gospel album.

What ‘jazz’ means to me is the worst kind of working conditions, the worst in cultural prejudice. The term ‘jazz’ has come to mean the abuse and exploitation of black musicians.

There’s a wonderful tradition of jazz people getting on stage and jamming and finding some feeling for music with audiences who may be fresh. For others, it might be just like a comfortable shirt they’ve been wearing.

New Age is a very small box. It was a term that was brought in by the music industry to classify music that is neither jazz, classical, pop or rock. They didn’t know what to call it or what to do with it. So they threw it all together under this one name.

I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they’ll become a great musician.

Everything that I’m doing, it’s like a future jazz, future trap house movement.

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.

Jazz is a fighter. The word ‘jazz’ means to me, ‘I dare you. Let’s jump into the unknown!’

It was actually my partner, Bernard Edwards, who helped me develop my sort of funky jazz style.

The people in Japan know more about the history of jazz and the musicians than the people in the United States do.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can’t explain it. They really can’t translate feeling because they’re not part of it. That’s why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.

I took several years of dance lessons that included ballet, tap and jazz. They helped a great deal with body control, balance, a sense of rhythm, and timing.

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 mine, and I sang and played the guitar on it.

From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.

I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they’re trying to say with jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.

I’m a jazz musician in that I have achieved Grade 3 on the French horn.

We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.

I love jazz and funk, because it’s hard. If it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing.

Jazz is about being in the moment.

Free form jazz means absolutely nothing to me. Because there are no boundaries.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

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 or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.

I enjoy playing clubs. I still enjoy the closeness of the nightclub venue. However, after a certain period of time and after playing around some of the clubs in New YorkI felt that jazz should be presented in a more prestigious atmosphere.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

The first job I ever had was singing in a jazz club when I was like 15 with my friend, and we earned like 70 bucks. We were like, ‘Oh my God!’

There’s nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, in trying to bend every child to match a one-size-fits-all notion of what it means to be a boy or girl of a specific age. Better to set a few parameters and then go with the flow. Call it ‘jazz parenting.’

I’m really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now – the New Orleans stuff – a lot more than I did before.

The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It’s their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It’s our great contribution to the arts.

My music is jazz.

I wasn’t into jazz so much – I preferred things raw.

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music – you can’t do that in jazz. You can’t do that with classical.

I’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.

Why can’t jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.

I am a big music guy. Hip-hop, R&B, old school, jazz.

I don’t like it when a player says, ‘I like freedom; I want to play for myself.’ Because the player has to understand he is part of a team with 10 other players. If everyone wants to be a jazz musician, it will be chaos. They will not be a team, and nothing will be possible.

The most important thing about Jazz at Lincoln Center is the fact that it’s the first time that perhaps the most important art form in American culture has a place to really exhibit itself and dedicated to its own particular conditions of performance.

I grew up listening to hipster jazz and classical records… we went and watched ballet and orchestras – lots of cool stuff. Which I’m really grateful for – it’s pretty nice being introduced to that when you’re little.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.

Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise.

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.

I have this theory that I hold on to, the theory that everything great in art and in life in general is jazz. It’s just like all these things that just kind of seem to fall into place. You know, like mistakes that somehow turn into something beautiful.

I think the singer/songwriter genre is going to be like bluegrass and jazz. You can make a living at it, but it’s not part of the musical mainstream anymore.

I don’t really have a favorite genre. I could listen to a rock song, a metal song, jazz, pop music, whatever. For me, whatever style it is, it always depends on the chord progression, the lyrics, and the melody used.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

There’s mediocre jazz, mediocre salesmen, mediocre golfers. If you want to be good, you have to really hone your skills.

As a matter of fact, we put it down because we wanted to be jazz pickers.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where we listened to all kinds of music. We listened to Haitian, hip hop, soul, classical jazz, gospel and Cuban music, to name a few. When you have access to that as a child, it just opens up your world.

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

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there’s one way that you do something, and that’s the only way. In jazz, it’s a lot different.

I was lucky enough to grow up in an era when radio was less formatted. It was really special. You could hear a jazz song then a pop song then a show tune then some jazz. Basically, whatever the DJ felt like playing, he would play. He was educating you and exposing you to things you would never hear otherwise.

To my ears, jazz sounds better in warm weather and after the sun has gone down. While I will listen to some of my favorite jazz records in cooler weather, it’s the warmer nights that really make them come alive. Something about those sounds and the heat of the night really makes it happen for me.

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 the jazz, and their call quickens with warm weather, slows again with cool.

My parents have always been open to me trying new things, whether it’s yoga or ballet or tap or jazz or piano or horse riding.

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

As an artist, you have to express yourself. I make no excuses for my versatility. I grew up singing classical arias, but I love rock n’ roll and jazz standards.

Fitzgerald coined the phrase the ‘Jazz Age,’ and now we’re living in the Hip-Hop Age.

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.

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.

At 3 A.M., I’m still up watching videos of jazz heroes I never saw live. It’s so thrilling. And not just the music. The Internet is changing the future of fund-raising. I’m thrilled by the potential.

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn’t methodical, but jazz isn’t messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

Diplomacy is like jazz: endless variations on a theme.

I flow between modern and traditional jazz, between samba and choro – all maybe in a week’s time.

I like jazz, but I could never play it. You just sit there with a guitar the size of a Chevy on your chest, wearing a stupid hat, playing the same solo for an hour.

I don’t know how much more what I’ve done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There’ve been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.

Jazz in the 1920s and ’30s was dance music, teenage music for parties, for being wild and young. There’s this punk feeling I really love. It was something so radical and different and new and not codified. People didn’t have a definition of what they were doing.

Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn’t even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that’s been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.

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

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they’re trying to say with jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it’s not a fad. It’s up to us to see to it that it stays alive.