Quotes About Jazz

If you're a lay person listening to jazz, you don't necessarily understand everything that's happening within the form. But you get the sense of it, the feel of it, because you're getting to hear something that develops right in front of your face.

I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that.

My first Grammy wasn't even in a jazz category, but of course I was really excited. 'Rockit' was the beginning of kind of a new era for the whole hip-hop movement.

Today jazz is still very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians.

My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.

I love nineties stuff like Alice in Chains and Nine Inch Nails. It'd be my dream to have a Radiohead-themed episode of 'Glee.' I also love jazz greats like Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Herbie Hancock.

I'd love to see a Nirvana biopic. I loved them when I was younger. I really like jazz music, so I'd like to see a Billie Holiday biopic - she was a fascinating woman.

Free form jazz means absolutely nothing to me. Because there are no boundaries.

Sometimes I'll be in circles, and I'll say I'm a jazz singer, and they have no idea what that means.

From the hell of the slave quarters would come some of the Deep South's great gifts to the continent: blues, jazz, gospel, and rock and roll, as well as the Caribbean-inspired foodways today enshrined in Southern-style barbeque joints from Miami to Anchorage.

He traveled, he studied, he taught ... He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth and ennui and discarded merry cans with labels and the jungle jingles of exported jazz. He often felt that the famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended garden were but places on the map of his own madness.

Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930  Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

It's crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating Jazzband. No?

It's crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating Jazzband. No?

I'm obsessed with the 1920s, everything from the style to the lifestyle. It was a really cool era.

I played saxophone, so I was into jazz. I learned from each audience and each teacher that I had. I can't really tell you any rules or anything, but the way I develop my beliefs is really just by personally learning from different situations.

Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor.

My secret dream has always been to be a jazz musician. I tried the saxophone for a year or two when I was younger, but unfortunately I had to face the fact that I was not really talented!

I listened to a lot of Amy Winehouse: her albums 'Frank' and 'Back to Black'. She was such an incredible artist. She was just so raw and had her unique sound; she paired jazz with pop and was so soulful at the same time. So I pulled from her a lot in the beginning.

I believe that blues and jazz are the two uniquely American contributions into music.

Now, jazz institutions are more readily available for young people, but for me, the institutions were the bands that I was in. When I worked with Clark Terry, that was the beginning of school for me, and Harry Belafonte and Sergio Mendes, they were all my universities.

I was in this public high school in Princeton, and it had this topnotch jazz program - if you were a musician of any kind of caliber, your holy grail was to be in that orchestra. It was that claim to fame of the school, of the town, other than the university. But it was better than the university band.

I was working with the computer at university and playing jazz in the daytime, buying west-coast psychedelic and early Kraftwerk records in the afternoon, and playing folk at night. I was quite busy!

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.