Browsing Topic Best Jazz Quotes

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

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

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

Only in spontaneity can we be who we truly are.

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

The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.

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

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

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.

Without the beat in the background, Jazz basically sounds like an armadillo was let loose on the keyboard.

The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.

There’s no future without the past and anybody who doesn’t really understand where jazz has come from has no right to try to direct where it’s going.

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.

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

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

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

The worst crime is faking it.

Music is an addiction.

All bad jazz sounds like Woody Woodpecker.

Lately I’ve been listening to some classical music again, some jazz.

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Blues and jazz pulled me away from what was left of my family.

Miles Davis fully embraced possibilities and delved into it. He was criticized heavily from the jazz side. He was supposed to be part of a tradition, but he didn’t consider himself part of a tradition.

The only reason they’re out there is to see me fall into the damn orchestra pit.

Jazz, rock and roll, movies and comics are the culture of America.

From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.

One of the things that’s clear to me from interviews that I’ve read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.

American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is – along with Jazz – the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.

In America, for a brief time, people who followed John Coltrane were studied and considered important, but it didn’t last long. The result is that the kind of music I played in the ’60’s is completely dismissed in this country as a wrong turn, a suicidal effort.

You have to make a decided effort to not get seduced by the Blues.

Bebop was like humming along to Mitch Miller to me.

Jazz should be much less about stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content.

If the modern spirit, whatever that may be, is disinclined towards taking the Lord’s word at its face value (as I hear is the case), we may observe that Isaiah’s testimony to the character of the masses has strong collateral support from respectable Gentile authority. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus, when Athens was at the peak of its jazz-and-paper era, and he speaks of the Athenian masses with all Isaiah’s fervency, even comparing them to a herd of ravenous wild beasts.

An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.