Jazz Quotes

Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.

Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once.

Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.

There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.

You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.

Well, I'm too old to pimp, and too young to die, so I'm just gonna keep playin'

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

The worst crime is faking it.

Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Well if I could play like Wynton, I wouldn't play like Wynton.

Don't worry about playing a lot of notes. Just find one pretty one.

Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.

Gospel music rhythms are not African in origin, although I know that's what the jazz experts say.

Benny Goodman was one of the big influences as a clarinet player. That's why I wanted the clarinet.

To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

Don t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.

Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.

I don't have a definition of Jazz. You're just supposed to know it when you hear it.

The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

A genius is the one most like himself.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it's composition.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

When you sing, always tell the truth.

The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.

One of the reasons we're here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

I didn't know there were 2 ten o'clocks in a day.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.'

Imitate, assimilate, and innovate.

Change is always happening. That's one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

There are no natural barriers. It's all music. It's either hip or it ain't.

There are notes between notes, you know.

This is so nice, it must be illegal.

We're having a hard time understanding where jazz is going. What happened to jazz?

I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such.

I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.

There is no such thing as a wrong note.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it. If you're swept away by it you can't wait to do it again and the same magical moments always come.

I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.

Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

You should never be comfortable, man. Being comfortable fouled up a lot of musicians.

Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.