Quotes About Jazz

In 'Where the Air is Clear', Carlos Fuentes composed a polyphonic portrait of Mexico City amid the growth and modernization brought on by the economic boom of the 1950s. The novel can be read as a jazz interpretation - free and in a Mexican key - of John Dos Passos' 'Manhattan Transfer'.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

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 guy Miles Davis. He made this famous album in 1959 called Kind of Blue which is kind of, always, how I feel. That album gets into your bones goes and goes starts, hesitates, reaches out, feels for the music, the sound, the thing you want to change. Always grasping for the unattainable makes you kind of excited, kind of sorry.

It's the start of something loud and soft, classic jazz and wordless love song, free and entangled: forgiving yourself for being human, for the things you want to grab hold of, own and giving yourself permission when you need to let go.

The John Handy Quintet was on the stereo and the song was "Naima," Handy's 1967 ode to John Coltrane.

Ron Carter was accompanied by two guitars and playing a Milt Jackson song called "Bags' Groove.

I gravitated toward music that invoked loneliness in me. Jazz. More to the point, the sound of the jazz saxophone. I started with the essentials—John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter

New Year's Eve was a night for jazz, and the saxophone could cut you in half if you were alone.

Frank Morgan, George Cables, Art Pepper, Ron Carter, and Thelonious Monk.

Charles Mingus at Carnegie Hall

You don't show respect to Frank Sinatra and his great example by trying to sound exactly like him. You show it by sounding exactly like you, and that's the way jazz has always progressed as an art form.

I listen to a lot of jazz. I'm a big Sinatra geek. I love Chet Baker.

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be some jazz.

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've often felt I've been born out of my time, and when I started Fairground Attraction in the 1980s, I wanted to be a 1940s jazz singer.

I started as a jazz musician, not a singer, then I became a rock 'n' roll artist with Aphrodite's Child.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

No one in the world can beat Ella Fitzgerald as a riff singer.

My mother is a singer, still performs today; she's a jazz singer.

I'm not a folk or jazz singer, more a hard-edged pop singer - with some rock, and song hooks.

The most common misconception about me is that I'm basically a jazz singer.

I'd like to be a jazz singer, but I couldn't possibly do it; nobody would want me, anyway.

I was brought up in a house with a lot of appreciation for music, all kinds of music, including jazz. But I never knew that it could really be a career. I didn't know any jazz singers. I never saw live jazz. I only heard these records.

I've been a massive obsessive about jazz singers all my life.