Jazz Musician Quotes - Page 4

• I would not describe myself as an avid jazz fan and I am not a jazz musician myself. However, that is not to say that jazz does not play a vital and important role in my life.

  Nat Wolff

  Avid, Play, Important

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.

  Evan Parker

  Air, People, Musical

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• The jazz musician's function is to feel.

  Lennie Tristano

  Musician, Jazz, Function

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• I visited New York in '63, intending to move there, but I noticed that what I valued about jazz was being discarded. I ran into `out-to-lunch' free jazz, and the notion that groove was old-fashioned. All around the United States, I could see jazz becoming linear, a horn-player's world. It made me realize that we were not jazz musicians; we were territory musicians in love with all forms of African-American music. All of the musicians I loved were territory musicians, deeply into blues and gospel as well as jazz.

  Joe Sample

  New York, Moving, Player

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• Companies have to take risks to get new knowledge, in a manner similar to how jazz musicians take risks when they go after a new approach to a tune or a performance.

  John Kao

  Risk, Musician, Tunes

  Interview with Joel Kurtzman, www.strategy-business.com. October 1, 1996.

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• Europe was a very contentious subject in literature and yet jazz musicians still depended on Europe. Now it's not such a big deal.

  Darryl Pinckney

  Europe, Musician, Literature

  Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. April 4, 2016.

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• I don't think of myself as a jazz musician but a medicine man.

  Abdullah Ibrahim

  Thinking, Men, Medicine

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• Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are echoes of the body's music. It is the body's vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.

  Anais Nin

  Echoes, Giving, Secret

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• All music now, I think, is fair game for jazz musicians to interpret, and they have been. I would consider those songs standards now. "Norwegian Wood" is a standard; "Call Me" is a standard.

  Patricia Barber

  Song, Thinking, Musician

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I was going to say is that I come from a rock background, but also I was super interested in jazz for a long time. I was training to be a jazz musician for quite a while. I never trained to be a classical composer or player, but I did train to play jazz.

  Jherek Bischoff

  Player, Long, Training

  Source: thequietus.com

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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 read an interview with a Japanese freestyle jazz musician once, and he said something like, "Everything I'm going to tell you is not going to be true." He's not saying, "I'm trying to lie to you." But he's kind of saying that you can never say what something really is.

  Paul Beatty

  Lying, Trying, Musician

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There's been this perception that Europeans still hold on to, that they discover the real talented ones in American culture and give them proper credit and that's not true anymore - it used to be. A lot of jazz musicians would get respect in Europe.

  Andrew Bird

  Real, Europe, Giving

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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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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• 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 actually wanted to be a jazz musician first. My grandparents introduced me to Louis Armstrong. I loved Louis Armstrong so I took up the trumpet and just did that every day and practiced that.

  Douglas Booth

  Grandparent, Musician, Firsts

  Source: www.justjared.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Comedy is the drug, when they laugh it's like I'm a jazz musician and they hear it, and they get it. It's power to take the crowd wherever I want them to go. I love it when they laugh, especially when they relate through laughter. It's a beautiful thing. It also means I'm going to get paid, which is nice.

  Alonzo Bodden

  Beautiful, Laughter, Nice

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• I'm a jazz musician by education and vocation, but I don't think jazz should [ dictate] what I want to do.

  Dave Douglas

  Thinking, Musician, Want

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• That's a skill that I'm proud of: to be able to be a jazz musician and go a bit crazy sometimes and other times be able to pull it all in and lay it down like a track.

  Robert Glasper

  Crazy, Track, Proud

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• My short answer would be that there is no greatest jazz musician of the century. Jazz, like any valid art form, finds its greatness in its expression of the human spirit, and, to me, this can’t be reduced to a contest.

  Bennie Wallace

  Art, Greatness, Expression

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