Jazz Quotes
We don't live in a jazz world, unfortunately. I think if I had lived in a jazz world, I would have done OK. I'm not sure I would have done great. I'm a lover of jazz music, so I would have been happy, don't get me wrong. I go to jazz concerts like the biggest jazz fan in world. The drag is that I don't play jazz for a living.
George Benson
All the forms of popular music from jazz to hip-hop, to bebop, to soul come from black innovation. You talk about different dances from the catwalk, to the jitterbug, to the Charleston, to break dancing -\-\ all these are forms of black dancing...What would [life] be without a song, without a dance, and joy and laughter, and music.
Michael Jackson
Amsterdam must have more than a million people. But the only area where jazz is really profitable and successful in an economic sense is in Japan. That's because they haven't been exposed enough.
Norman Granz
Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Some people think I'm a rock 'n' roll musician and some think I'm a jazz musician but, for me, there is no difference.
Georgie Fame
The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.
Billy Joel
Armstrong was the key creator of the mature working language of jazz. Three decades after his death and more than three-quarters of a century since his influence first began to spread, not a single musician who has mastered that language fails to make daily use, knowingly or unknowingly, of something that was invented by Louis Armstrong.
Dan Morgenstern
Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijana, and will expire on cocaine.
Artie Shaw
Don't play what's there, play what's not there.
Miles Davis
I've never listened to jazz. It's just not something I ever paid attention to.
Oprah Winfrey
Not according to this," Jazz said, taking the report. "No evidence of sexual activity or anything like it." "Well, there's that," Howie said, sounding relieved. Jazz wondered at that - was it really so much better to be unmolested, but still murdered in a horrible fashion? To die in pain and terror, stripped, left in a field, your fingers cut off? But as long as you weren't raped, well, that was alright, then? Did it really matter at that point?
Barry Lyga
Milton, of all people, gave the most perfect definition of the state of mind required to play jazz: ' with wanton heed and giddy cunning.' That's how you play jazz.
Paul Desmond
Duke Ellington's career traces the entire history of jazz. The repertoire associated with him contains the most important elements in the music and provides concrete examples of some of the best ways to present the music in the widest variety of settings-radio, TV, recordings, movies, concert halls, festivals, solo, small ensemble, big band, symphony orchestra, opera, Broadway shows.... You name it, he did it!
Billy Taylor
Many of the jazz musicians whom are no longer here. You don't realize that it's history when it is happening and then time passes and you look at a picture and you say "Wow, there is history attached to that."
Carol Friedman
I think we as human beings need to be able to appreciate each other's differences and I think jazz really takes us in that direction.
Herb Alpert
I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.
Norman Granz
Normal adults can doodle, amble, and drift with no need to assess risk, since there is normally no risk at all. Jazz improvisation seems less subject to standards of risk than surgery, and less than much formal athletic performance, as in a tennis match.
Ernest Sosa
I think when you look back at the different eras in jazz, what leads from one to another is never a melodic revolution, but a rhythmic revolution.
Stefon Harris
