Quotes About Jazz

I grew up listening to Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, guys with blues backgrounds.

I think Wes Montgomery is the greatest jazz guitarist that ever lived.

If we are going to list guitar influences, the biggest one by far is Wes Montgomery. Also, Gary Burton was obviously huge for me in a number of ways. But beyond that, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

We were the first small American jazz group since Sidney Bechet in 1927 to play for the public in Moscow and Leningrad.

The most important thing about Jazz at Lincoln Center is the fact that it's the first time that perhaps the most important art form in American culture has a place to really exhibit itself and dedicated to its own particular conditions of performance.

We used to go to the jazz fest in Kansas City. And my mother and father took me.

I grew up in a jazz household. They made me listen to jazz before I could hear my Motown.

I grew up listening to a lot of classic jazz, and stuff like The Beatles, and old Motown stuff, and a lot of classical music. I just loved all of that.

On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player. From that, we might conclude that she was equally dumb about jazz.

On the subject of Egypt, Ellen Cherry was so vague she thought Ramses II was a jazz piano player.

but the script he saw written all about him, on the signposts and facades of Alexandria, was musical, all right. It ran complicated scales on the optic nerve. Everywhere, the Arabic alphabet wiggled and popped, enlivening crumbling architecture with outbursts of linguistic jazz, notations from the DNA songbook, energetic markings as primal as grunts and as modern as the abstract electricity of synthesizer feedback.

On the far wall, just behind the drummer, a hand-painted black-and-white sign read Traditional request $1; Others $2; The Saints $5.

What solicited my attention was whether the cultural associations of jazz were as important to Cardinal's "possession" as were its intellectual foundations. I was interested, as I had been... in the way black people ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in literature not written by them. In fact I had started, casually like a game, keeping a file of such instances.

When you are studying jazz, the best thing to do is listen to records or listen to live music. It isn't as though you go to a teacher. You just listen as much as you can and absorb everything.

Jazz came to America 300 years ago in chains.

Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.

To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni.

Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers

I know that composers know my voice type and what songs will suit me. I have been able to mould my voice according to the nature of the song given to me, be it rock, pop or jazz.

I really like jazz and soul, but I also love so many other types of music, and I didn't want to be afraid to blend and experiment.

I've learnt new scales through playing different types of music, like Indian raga scales, gipsy scales and harmonically-based jazz scales.