Quotes About Jazz

I've tried to learn as much as I can about the great jazz singers to understand what makes them important, vital artists, but there is always something more to learn.

Because the blues is the basis of most American music in the 20th century. It's a 12-bar form that's played by jazz, bluegrass and country musicians. It has a rhythmic vocabulary that's been used by rock n' roll. It's related to spirituals, and even the American fiddle tradition.

I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I'm a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

My vocal influences are a lot of jazz singers: Billie Holiday, Julie London, they had this tenderness to their voice.

I went to a performing arts school, and we studied musical theater, jazz vocal performance, and they kind of start you out on those things because they feel like it is a good foundation, and it was.

I came from being a singer going into jazz. And that's one of the things that polio did for me is it took away my ability to sing with a range because it paralyzed my vocal chords, so that was when I started playing. But I hear the music as if I were singing even when I am playing.

When I was a kid, I used to listen to my Emerson radio late at night under the covers. I started by listening to jazz in the late 1940s and then vocal harmony groups like the Four Freshmen, the Modernaires and the Hi-Lo's. I loved Stan Kenton's big band - with those dark chords and musicians who could swing cool with individual sounds.

Ultimately, I'd say a lot of my vocal influences are jazz-based, people like Ella Fitzgerald, or Fred Astaire.

I progressed through so many different styles of music through my teen years, both as a player and a vocalist, particularly the jazz and pop of the early 20th Century.

In college, I was able to be the vocalist for the jazz band at Arkansas State.

One of my biggest musical influences is definitely Ella Fitzgerald as a vocalist.

Man, I just feel so fortunate to be a jazz musician at all. I have a hard time thinking of it any other way. It's such a fulfilling vocation. I love it.

The musicians in Chicago gave me my vocation, but New York calls to a jazz musician, for sure. You want to test your mettle.

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.

If you like an instrument that sings, play the saxophone. At its best it's like the human voice.

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 little boogie-woogie thing that I did, so I did my little boogie-woogie thing. I had a very high-pitched voice.

When I heard Billie Holiday's voice, Nina Simone's and Ella Fitzgerald's - there was something about their voices to me that was such a different texture than what I was used to listening to at the time. Hearing those jazz voices were so different, and I think I just gravitated toward it.

My stuff was more of a folk coffeehouse thing, with more acoustic guitar, just me doing a single, and then adding on instruments and voices, with emphasis on lyrics and singing and light kind of acoustic jazz.

I don't like freedom jazz - I think it's void of roots and void of foundation.

I think L.A. has one of the most innovative and forward-thinking jazz scenes in the world. New York definitely has the volume - there's more music happening in New York than anywhere else. But to me, L.A. - it's kind of a gift and a curse.

It's also crazy how Shakespeare has that cadence, and it's about locking into the jazz of the language, just like locking into the rhythm in N.W.A's lyrics.

I like to shop for old jazz albums.

There are no great jazz-fusion bands.

I've worked with a number of big bands, but there's nothing in life like the Basie band.