All Quotes

Jazz is a hard music, and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that's the most important thing.
‐‐ Joey Alexander

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.
‐‐ Marc Ribot

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.
‐‐ Ken Burns

Jazz is a very democratic musical form. It comes out of a communal experience. We take our respective instruments and collectively create a thing of beauty.
‐‐ Max Roach

Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with.
‐‐ Paul Horn

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
‐‐ Nina Simone

Jazz is about being in the moment.
‐‐ Herbie Hancock

Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.
‐‐ Dave Brubeck

Jazz is all about improvisation and it's about the moment in time, doing it this way now, and you'll never do it this way twice. I've studied the masters. Why would I want to play ball after the guys who sit on a bench? I want to play like Michael Jordan.
‐‐ Brian McKnight

Jazz is an art that takes decades to appreciate and understand.
‐‐ Jake Shimabukuro

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

Jazz is letting everybody do his or her thing with the music.
‐‐ Percy Heath

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.
‐‐ Robert Glasper

Jazz is like wine. When it is new, it is only for the experts, but when it gets older, everybody wants it.
‐‐ Steve Lacy

Jazz is more raw than punk in a lot of ways. It's so expressive. A lot of people say to me, especially older people, 'It took me ages to get into jazz.'
‐‐ King Krule

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.
‐‐ Pat Metheny

Jazz is not the format where I want to stay, but it really is a starting point for me.
‐‐ Justin Guarini

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.
‐‐ John Corigliano

Jazz is pretty much the freest thing you can be a part of. It's the closest thing I can get to flying. It's fun, interactive. In its own way, it's a sport.
‐‐ Bria Skonberg

Jazz is progressive, and it's alive.
‐‐ Kat Edmonson

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!
‐‐ Christian Scott

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.
‐‐ Henri Matisse

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn't methodical, but jazz isn't messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.
‐‐ Nat Wolff

Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.
‐‐ Barbara Januszkiewicz

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

Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.
‐‐ Paul Whiteman

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.
‐‐ Tony Wilson

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
‐‐ Ornette Coleman

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.
‐‐ Keith Jarrett

Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.
‐‐ Miller Williams

Jazz isn't dead yet. It's the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it's a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it's coming out of the U.S., it's not going to survive unless it's got some jazz influence.
‐‐ Dave Brubeck

Jazz music and, more specifically, jazz musicians, are my artistic heroes. I want to be the Thelonious Monk of acting. He had no concern for how well he was received. He played whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. He just wasn't interested in achieving the good opinion of his audience. That's the Holy Grail of acting; of any art form.
‐‐ Trevor St. John

Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies.
‐‐ Albert Murray

Jazz music by its very nature is just a conglomerate of a lot of different kinds of music.
‐‐ David Sanborn

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
‐‐ Francoise Sagan

Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two great American institutions.
‐‐ Henry Rollins

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.
‐‐ Jelly Roll Morton

Jazz music should be inclusive. Smooth jazz to me rules out a certain kind of drama and a certain tension that I think all music needs. Especially jazz music, since improvising is one of the cornerstones of what jazz is. And when you smooth it out, you take all the drama out of it.
‐‐ David Sanborn

Jazz musicians don't make any money, so I might as well make some on the market. I pick my own stocks - Microsoft, Dell - the tech stocks, the breadwinners.
‐‐ Jason Moran

Jazz needs the help. It's the more sophisticated music. All the other music is on the TV, but jazz isn't.
‐‐ Billy Higgins

Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it's not a fad. It's up to us to see to it that it stays alive.
‐‐ Marla Gibbs

Jazz of the sort we play is a happy, extroverted music. You don't have to think about it too much.
‐‐ Chris Barber

Jazz radio is not very friendly to pop singers who decide to make a jazz record. But a lot of people have been. A lot of the people I've talked to like the record.
‐‐ Rita Coolidge

Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.
‐‐ Madeleine Peyroux

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

Jazz should be recognized as music of the people, based in a lot of accents and melodies. What is jazz but music that people danced to? Jazz has the dynamic thing. I don't think you have to be playing only Charlie Parker licks on your horn or whatever the new version of that is.
‐‐ Al Jarreau

Jazz sometimes can be really complicated and inaccessible to people because they don't know what to start with. You can start with something that you love, but if you start with something that you hate, then it's like, 'You know what, I hate jazz.' It took me a lot of time to catch on to jazz, too.
‐‐ Cecile McLorin Salvant

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

Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.
‐‐ Paul Whiteman