Quotes About Jazz

I get most of my influences from specific genres. I listen to a lot of R&B music, obviously. But, jazz, and bossa nova music, too.

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

I became aware of recorded piano music. The composition had no style to it. It wasn't jazz or classical or even elevator covers of pop tunes—just notes strung together in tight mathematical patterns with no heart.

A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that's when cuisine is truly exciting.

There's an album by Antonio Carlos Jobim - the album with 'The Girl From Ipanema.' That's the most seductive music ever.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most.

The Rabbis of that era lived in a time when culture, generally, depended on oral performance, something like good jazz artistry today. The great jazz players never play the same thing the same way twice, even though you can recognize the same song every time they play it.

Duke Ellington was famous for hs very original harmonic patterns.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled.

I like jazz, and Martin Taylor and his band have it all, including a wonderful saxophonist and very fine accordionist, so you get a rather unusual range of sound.

I had always been a jazz fan - Django Reinhardt, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, the early George Benson. And I come from the Hank Marvin melodic upbringing. So blues, I loved, but I also liked jazz. Therefore, my style was more lyrical.

I really love Dinah Washington and anything live from her - she had some of the greatest jazz musicians in the whole world, and sometimes she would be with a big band, and sometimes she'd just be on stage with a muted trumpet, upright bass, and a piano.

I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.

I think I was first awakened to musical exploration by Dizzy Gillespie and Bird. It was through their work that I began to learn about musical structures and the more theoretical aspects of music.

I work with many jazz artists as Miles Davis, Laughlin, etc.. One of the things all these artists had in common is that they had no fear.

I was blessed to work with The Jazz Messengers when the two piano players were Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

Playing jazz in restaurants is too stereotypical.

My harmony is passable but is usually made more eloquent at the hands of Steve Hamilton.

I mostly listen to very popular songs. But I'm a huge fan of Stevie Wonder, and I love jazz - Glenn Fredly, Diah Lestari - so 80% jazz, 20% mixed with everything - disco, hip hop.

One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It's a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.

I've always loved black culture; I don't know any other way to put it. Since I was a kid I loved music and early jazz, Sly and the Family Stone. I'm older - I'm in my early 50s - so you'll have to excuse me. That was always very exciting to me to connect to the culture on that level.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.