Jazz Music Quotes - Page 12

• When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Church Music, Hymns, Musician

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I don't listen to a lot of music when I have my free time. But I'll go to a jazz club and have a drink and listen to a good jazz musician. Or sometimes in the morning, if I want to put myself in a good mood, I'll put on some Latin music.

  Joshua Bell

  Morning, Latin, Musician

  "Joshua Bell’s Virtuoso Reality". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. May 2011.

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• Jazz musicians are the coolest people on the planet. Can I have some cool?

  Jon Stewart

  People, Musician, Jazz

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• He [Benny Carter] is all that every jazz musician the world over wants to be. He's performed 20,000 nights. How many shoes have been shined? How much mascara put on? Rouge? How many of those impossible bowties have been tied? How many love songs have been sung? How many dances have been danced? How many have passed to the sound of his music? It's been said that a man should not be forced to live up to his art. Benny Carter is one of the rare instances when we wonder whether the great art that a man has created can live up to him.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Song, Art, Night

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• I'm not a jazz musician, because, I mean, firstly, I can't play anything. I'm not bad on the tamborine. I have a certain way with the triangle. But I'm not a jazz musician ... my band, they always joke, they always say that I'm a disposable, pop, jazz superstar.

  Michael Buble

  Mean, Play, Musician

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• My father's rich, my momma's good looking. Right? And I can play the Blues. I've never suffered and don't intend to suffer.

  Miles Davis

  Music, Father, Play

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• People who are qualified are symphonic orchestra players and jazz musicians; they're qualified to do what they do. Rock stars are lucky. It's a combination of right time, right place and having certain genes or a gimmick or whatever, but it's really not anything more than sugar. It tastes good and goes away fast.

  Gene Simmons

  Stars, Player, Rocks

  Source: www.noise11.com

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• I just love all the music. My grandma was a church organist for 40 years, and she got me into jazz music and great songwriters, Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, all those folks. I can't do it, but I have a profound respect for it.

  Zach Anner

  Grandma, Years, Profound

  Source: abilitymagazine.com

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• I was raised on piano and saxophone and jazz music for ten or twelve years. Before I even picked up a bass. My whole family has always pushed the arts, you know? My brother is a doctor of music and my cousin is an opera singer over in Austria. Arts were always a big thing in our family.

  Matt Snell

  Art, Cousin, Brother

  Source: puregrainaudio.com

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• Jazz musicians are so comfortable. The reason they can't do what we do is because they're so comfortable doin' what they do.

  Miles Davis

  Musician, Jazz, Reason

  Source: hepcat1950.com

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• [Jazz musicians] feel comfortable with their clichés, you know.

  Miles Davis

  Musician, Jazz, Feels

  Source: hepcat1950.com

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• I did, I was in Europe a lot. I would say, mid 20s to late 30s. Less so in the last ten or twelve years. Based on some political stuff and other things, I think I'm not the only musician, the only American jazz musician that's not going to Europe quite as much. I think we're seen a little differently in the world, unfortunately, than we were pre-Iraq invasion and things like that.

  Jon Gordon

  Thinking, Years, Europe

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• Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and many other great jazz musicians objected to their music being called jazz. While the outside world may want to put a label on it, those who create it think of it just as music, and tend not to classify it.

  Dave Brubeck

  Art, Thinking, Musician

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Business today is all about improvisation, which is the essence of jazz. Perhaps in the past we could just follow the operating manual and do what we were told, but today the world is too complex and fast. Today it's all about real-time innovation and creativity. Individuals may get hired based on their resumes, but they'll get promoted and reach their dreams based on their ability to create. In that context, being a jazz musician was the best MBA I could have ever received.

  Josh Linkner

  Dream, Creativity, Past

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• I was deeply influenced by the sartorial practices of both preachers and jazz musicians and actually Masha in Act One of Anton Chekhov, my favorite writer's master piece,Three Sisters,when she arrives reflecting on whether they're ever going to get to Moscow, memories of the death of their father, and she's in black, and she says I'm in mourning for the world, saying in part that I have a sad soul and a cheerful disposition.

  Cornel West

  Memories, Father, Practice

  "Cornel West, 'Living And Loving Out Loud'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. October 29, 2009.

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• And if you look around, if you listen to some music nowdays, I'm not so optimistic...I have the feeling that some of the young people I've met they think already, before they start playing, they think already about the product: how can we sell it....maybe my view is really very old fashioned nowadays, but I think art at any times needs time for development and this fast food bullshit is not working... younger guys: take your time, music is really a thing of long terms, actually it's a lifelong thing to learn and to develop your own stuff.

  Peter Brotzmann

  Music, Art, Optimistic

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• I fear that I won't get better and that I won't have time to practice. To be called a "jazz musician" - it's a big responsibility.

  Esperanza Spalding

  Responsibility, Practice, Get Better

  "Esperanza Spalding: Insubordinate by Nature". Interview with Alex Frank, pitchfork.com. March 8, 2016.

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• I don't really have a career as a jazz musician. I don't really have a career as a classical musician. I don't really have a career as a college professor, and yet I did all those things and I did them well. I put out some records in the 1980's and 1990's that changed the way some trumpet players played.

  Paul Smoker

  Player, College, Careers

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• To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician)... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.

  Randy Sandke

  Country, Art, Yale

  Randy Sandke (2010). “Where the dark and the light folks meet: race and the mythology, politics, and business of jazz”, Scarecrow Pr

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• When I'm working behind a camera, I feel like I'm trying to achieve something like a jazz musician does.

  Jack Welpott

  Trying, Cameras, Musician

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• I always tell my students when you're going to be a jazz musician the first thing you've got to do is be a professional musician, and that means you have to feed yourself with the instrument.

  Lester Bowie

  Mean, Musician, Firsts

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• I started to listen to Japanese jazz musicians when I went to high school. Some people I listened to were Yosuke Yamashita, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Sadao Watanabe.

  Hiromi

  School, People, Musician

  "The Energy Is One: An Interview With Hiromi Uehara". Interview with Wayne Zade, www.allaboutjazz.com. October 20, 2003.

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• Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.

  Talib Kweli

  Art, Fire, Musician

  Interview with Paul D. Miller, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Taken, People, Want

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• I knew I could never be accepted as a straight-ahead jazz musician, nor would Iaccept myself as that. I would never be accepted as a minimalist. I wouldn't be adowntown composer. Because I find all orthodoxies, all doctrines to be ultimatelybanal.

  Anthony Davis

  Musician, Doctrine, Orthodoxy

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