Jazz Quotes - Page 4

• Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

  Dave Brubeck

  Voice, Musician, Chance

  40 Copy quote

• I wonder what an agent would do if he had to travel with the band he's booking.

  Mary Lou Williams

  Music, Band, Agents

  47 Copy quote

• To me, nostalgia is nothing more than a mindless plundering of the past for the commonplace.

  Mel Torme

  Music, Past, Nostalgia

  7 Copy quote

• The qualities in music which I considered most important - and still do - were beauty, simplicity, originality, discrimination, and sincerity.

  Paul Desmond

  Music, Simplicity, Important

  27 Copy quote

• Jazz is people's music, a collectivity.

  Steve Lacy

  People, Collectivity

  85 Copy quote

• Jazz is the language of the emotions.

  Charles Mingus

  Emotion, Language, Jazz Music

  8 Copy quote

• Jazz is what I play for a living.

  Louis Armstrong

  Play, Playing Jazz

  7 Copy quote

• Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

  Paul Desmond

  Writing, Talking, Taught

  32 Copy quote

• I'm all in favor of getting grants for musicians. Or any other good brand of Scotch.

  Pepper Adams

  Music, Scotch, Favors

  7 Copy quote

• Trane was the father. Pharoah was the son. I was the holy ghost.

  Albert Ayler

  Music, Father, Son

  14 Copy quote

• Make no mistake, this music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen to your Snoop Doggy Dog, Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, but add a little Ellington, Basie and Coltrane to your life as well.

  Christian McBride

  Music, Dog, Mistake

  9 Copy quote

• I tell my students, 'It's an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn its language all the way through. How are you going to know what's new to play, if you haven't listened to everything that's old?'

  Jackie McLean

  Music, Play, Important

  56 Copy quote

• Most customers, by the time the musicians reach the second set, are to some extent inebriated. They don't care what you play anyway.

  Charles Mingus

  Play, Musician, Care

  11 Copy quote

• I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes (harmonies) that were being used all the time. I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes I could play the thing I'd been hearing. I came alive.

  Charlie Parker

  Play, Bored, Lines

  "Hear Me Talkin' to Ya". Book by Nat Shapiro, p. 354, 1955.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Play, Making Love, Musician

  7 Copy quote

• It's a shame that jazz is now being turned into dried fruit. It's becoming quantized, diced and defined. It's becoming an idiom. To me if it's anything, jazz is a verb ? it's more like a process than it is a thing.

  Pat Metheny

  Verbs, Fruit, Becoming

  9 Copy quote

• Music is my religion. Music is the only thing that has never failed me. People let you down, music won't.

  Gary Bartz

  Music, People, Musical

  48 Copy quote

• The thing is this: When I play, what I try to do is to reach my subconscious level. I don't want to overtly think about anything, because you can't think and play at the same time - believe me, I've tried it (laughs).

  Sonny Rollins

  Music, Believe, Thinking

  25 Copy quote

• A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

  Abraham Maslow

  Inspirational, Music, Peace

  Abraham Harold Maslow, Edward Hoffman (1996). “Future visions: the unpublished papers of Abraham Maslow”, Sage Publications, Inc

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.

  Stan Getz

  Music, Alphabet, Language

  23 Copy quote

• My own feelings about the direction in which jazz should go are that there should be much less stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content, on what might be termed humanity in music and the freedom to say all that you want.

  Booker Little

  Music, Stress, Emotional

  45 Copy quote

• Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

  Miles Davis

  Music, Play, African American

  "SPIN" Magazine, (p. 30), December 1990.

  36 Copy quote

  Show source

• Don't be a perfectionist... leave that to the classical musicians.

  Dave Brubeck

  Musician, Perfectionist, Classical Music

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Art Blakey

  Country, Art, America

  19 Copy quote

• Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

  B. B. King

  Brother, School, College

  16 Copy quote