Best Jazz Quotes

It isn’t where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts.

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

Listen to her voice, don’t look at her.

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.

I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline!

Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.

It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

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

I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It’s either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there’s always a buzzing beneath you.

If it wasn’t for hustlers, gangsters & gamblers there’d be no Jazz. Wasn’t middle~class who said Let’s go hear Bird tonight.

There’s so much music out there & so many possibilities. I like anyone who plays any instrument.

The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.

I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group.

Jazz is what I play for a living.

We all do ‘do, re, mi,’ but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

Music was our wife and we loved her. We stayed with her, clothed her and put diamond rings on her hands.

Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is.

I hate Stanley Clark, but I have to admit he’s playing Jazz whether I like it or not.

I’m always doubting because I’ve been told so much that, you’re not the right look or you’re not the right sound, and, you know, whether I do jazz or R&B there are always complaints.

Most jazz players work out their solos, at least to the extent that they have a very specific vocabulary.

Everybody in Germany was for the -German cause. But then, after the war ended, when I heard the first Glenn Miller sound on the radio and these fantastic American music makers, I turned into a jazz fanatic. They called me Benny, after Benny Goodman. So, all of a sudden, the eyes of young Germans were opened to America – everything American was absolutely at the top of the list.

I really didn’t know a lot of rock ‘n’ roll until I moved to L.A. Before that, when I was in New York, I grew up listening mostly to R&B and soul and jazz.

Man, as long as people want to hear Jazz, I’ll give it to them.

I’ve gone the full spectrum – from gospel to blues to jazz to soul to pop – and the public has accepted what I’ve done through it all. I think it means I’ve been doing something right at the right time.

I listen to classical music very much. There’s a lot of jazz that I don’t enjoy listening to.

There’s only two ways to sum up music; either it’s good or it’s bad. If it’s good you don’t mess about it, you just enjoy it.

All bad jazz sounds like Woody Woodpecker.

I’d like to feel that whatever I play is a result of whatever I’ve heard.

Footballers can be like artists when the mind and body are working as one. It is what Miles Davis does when he plays free jazz – everything pulls together into one intense moment that is beautiful.

If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.

In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.

The old jazz singers or old blues singers, you always just saw them kind of sitting down and singing. They weren’t worried as much about their voice sounding perfect. They would make the song kind of fit their voice.

Music is the greatest communication in the world.

I find that jazz loosens up the deep place of my mind, lets me find my own strange rhythms. Generally, I find the knottier the jazz, the better. Anything with singing is a distraction. Listening to classical music tends to have the unconscious effect of making my writing too smooth.