Quotes About Jazz

The public, hearing pop music, is, without knowing it, also soaking up jazz.

I was in rehab for nine months, and I needed some solace and distraction. I was in town one day and I sort of stumbled into a jazz jam session, and kept going back.

When you have 13 horns, and one is soloing, you have 12 people to play the richest, fullest chord you could ever imagine behind that solo.

Jazz is something that's constantly changing. Its sole purpose is to let people improvise, to let them solo differently each time they play. And that's always been what I like best.

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.

In some ways Lester Young is the most complex rhythmically of any musician. He does some things which are just phenomenal.

Dizzy Gillespie, the jazz trumpet player, once said, "It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play." He was one of my special ones. And he was quite correct. Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But

My style of singing is very much Latin jazz meets Latin and a little bit of rhythm and blues. When I do ballads, my fans love it. They want to listen to my classics. They want to party.

I like mellow music. I like some jazz. But I'm not a big hard rock guy.

I like what I hear other guys doing, but the thing that really attracts me is melodic playing.

I was three or four, and my mother would have a Bing Crosby record playing through the house. It was my introduction to jazz, harmonies, melodies, musicianship, and emotion.

The clarinet is not so dominant in Israeli music as it is in klezmer. I heard klezmer when I was growing up, but for some reason I avoided it. I listened to Louis Armstrong instead. But the sense of melody is the connection between jazz and klezmer.

It's the old-school jazz mentality that I connect with the most. I dig the idea of the seeker, the guy who's always trying to figure out why he is doing music and trying to understand and make sense of his instrument in a world which deals with rigid instruction.

I wanted to look at the mentality that can breed that sort of intensity, that kind of cutthroat, pressure-cooker feeling, especially a form of music like jazz, that should be - or you'd think should be - all about liberation and improvisation and everything.

I always dreamt of being in 'Kerrang.' That was my ambition. I read that religiously when I was into heavy metal. Then the jazz magazines took over.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

I believe that a hundred years from now, when people look back at the 20th century, they will look at Miles, Bird, Clifford Brown, Ella and Dizzy, among elders as our Mozarts, our Chopins, our Bachs and Beethovens.

Dizzy used to tell me that I am playing too hard. He used to say to not give everything. Miles used to tell me that too.

I like to listed to the adventurous guys - the Coltranes, Miles Davis, the guys who just let it loose.

When I got started in New York, it wasn't like it is now. If you were different from Miles and Dizzy, it was very difficult to make gigs and make money with your own style.

My playing started to develop through the Miles Davis stuff I was listening to.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

Miles Davis is a major influence of mine in terms of the way that I am as a bandleader.

My musical influences are from the '50s: Bill Evans, Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal.