Quotes About Jazz

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

Yeah, I grew up playing lots of jazz music in school.

I guess certain kinds of jazz music could be Crunk. But the average jazz song, no, it's not Crunk.

Truth of the matter is, jazz is American music. And that doesn't mean bebop. Jazz is really about improvising. All the music that's been created in America has been pretty much improvised... Whether it's hillbilly or rock n' roll for blues, it's basically jazz music... It's basically about another way of hearing what comes out of America.

I studied classical and jazz music and went to a music school.

I can turn on some jazz guitarist, and he won't do a thing for me, if he's not playing electrically. But Jeff Beck's great to listen to.

I'm influenced by Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelly, Roland Kirk, John Coltrane, B.B. King, and then by bluegrass. But when I was 16, bluegrass wasn't cool. We was rock n' rollers then: Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis.

They had the music being piped right out on the street. I'd be three or four blocks from there and I couldn't get there fast enough because I'd hear old Joe holler them words.

Joe Sample was one of my heroes. I met him at the Curacao Jazz festival, and I fanned out like he was the Beatles!

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States.

I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy.

Working in bars back then, in the '50s, to get a job you had to play all kinds of music. There'd be customers come in and yell jazz tunes at you and yell rock 'n' roll tunes at you and polkas and rhythm and blues and country music.

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.

I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It's either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there's always a buzzing beneath you.

Bernstein grew up in my building in New York. He's a very, very fine player. When he was a kid, he came by to find out what was going on in the world of jazz.

As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

I've been listening to jazzmen, especially saxophonists, since the time of the early Count Basie records, which featured Lester Young. Pres was my first real influence, but the first horn I got was an alto, not a tenor.

A respectable-sized audience hasn't really been able to follow developments in jazz since the free jazz movement in the '60s. Some of them can't even get with John Coltrane. Audiences are diminishing more and more rapidly. Some of the top young musicians with something new to say can't get record companies to put out their stuff.

I was curious and hungry at a young age, and jazz was such a mystery to me, an ocean where you can express yourself in the moment. It represented freedom, it represented wearing wings and going somewhere with music.

When I was very young, there was a lot of music at home, mostly jazz. I was walking around singing and pretending I was in bands from a very young age. But the first song that was really personal to me was 'Blue Suede Shoes'.

You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.

I really want to bring ensemble playing back to the forefront - not just for me, but for everyone in jazz. When you have a group, a true co-op group, you can really heighten the possibilities of all the treasures of jazz.

I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.