A jazz musician can improvise based on his knowledge of music. He understands how things go together. For a chef, once you have that basis, that’s when cuisine is truly exciting.
Charlie Trotter
At heart I’ve always been a jazz man.
James Brown
Boxing is like jazz, the better it is, the less people appreciate it.
George Foreman
By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.
Duke Ellington
Don’t think of yourself as a jazz musician. Think of yourself as a human being who plays music.
Charlie Haden
Every Christmas there are volunteers sent to save us from the wrath of Burl Ives. They are called jazz musicians.
Mark Corroto
Good jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms, and yells. Fine jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra runaround the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.
Charles Mingus
Hot can be cool, and cool can be hot, and each can be both. But hot or cool, man, jazz is jazz.
Louis Armstrong
I don’t have a definition of jazz… You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.
Thelonious Monk
I don’t know where jazz is going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.
Thelonius Monk
I never heard of a jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so what are you going to do? Play for the walls?
Nat Adderley
If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.
Wes Montgomery
If America has a future, Jazz has a future. The two are inseparable.
George Russell
If I’m going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.
Ice T
If it has more than three chords, it’s jazz.
Lou Reed
If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.
Pat Metheny
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.
Bill Evans
It takes an intelligent ear to listen to jazz.
Art Blakey
Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world.
Ahmad Alaadeen
Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.
Duke Ellington
Jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.
Herbie Hancock
Jazz is a feeling, more than anything else. It isn’t music, it’s language…
Enos Payne
Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.
Duke Ellington
Jazz is a mental attitude rather than a style. It uses a certain process of the mind expressed spontaneously through some musical instrument. I’m concerned with retaining that process.
Bill Evans
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 America’s classical music.
Billy Taylor
Jazz is an art form that depends on its antecedents, there must be respect for the people that have gone before.
Jon Hendricks
Jazz is freedom. You think about that.
Thelonius Monk
Jazz is improvisation and syncopation, with resilience and flow, with earthy elegance, nuance and subtlety, with the integrity of individual expression within a group context, with true democracy in action.
Greg Thomas
Jazz is like a great void, it waits patiently until a brave musician takes control of space and time.
Chris Griffin
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 music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.
Johnny Griffin
Jazz is my adventure. I’m after new chords, new ways of syncopating, new figures, new runs. How to use notes differently. That’s it. Just using notes differently.
Thelonious Monk
Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise… but a way of life.
Lester Bowie
Jazz is not a what, it is a how.
Bill Evans
Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
Wynton Marsalis
Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.
Keith Jarrett
Jazz is people’s music, a collectivity.
Steve Lacy
Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.
Louis Armstrong
Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around.
Miles Davis
Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now.
Pat Martino
Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.
Paul Whiteman
Jazz is the language of the emotions.
Charles Mingus
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
Ornette Coleman
Jazz is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.
Sonny Rollins
Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.
Keith Jarrett
Jazz is what I play for a living.
Louis Armstrong
Jazz is… An open-ended music designed for open minds.
Unknown Author
Jazz is… One of life’s greatest gifts: fun found within surprise.
Unknown Author
Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.
Frank Zappa
Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
Francoise Sagan
Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It’s conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.
Wynton Marsalis
Jazz vision is a wordless conversation between musical notes and visual expressions.
Barbara Januszkiewicz
Jazz was born out of the whiskey bottle, was raised on marijiana, and will expire on cocaine.
Artie Shaw
Jazz was not built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.
Cab Calloway
Jazz washes away the dust of every day life.
Art Blakey
Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me the way I feel through jazz, or whatever. Music is, or was, a language of the emotions.
Charles Mingus
Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise…
George Gershwin
No America, no jazz.
Art Blakey
Oh, jazz and love are the hardest things to describe from rationale.
Mel Torme
One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.
Lou Reed
One thing I like about jazz, kid, is that I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?
Bix Beiderbecke
Painting, I think it’s like jazz.
Brian Eno
‘Swing’ is an adjective or a verb, not a noun. All jazz musicians should swing. There is no such thing as a ‘swing band’ in music.
Artie Shaw
The beauty of jazz is that it is malleable. People address to suit their own personalities.
Pat Metheny
The Jazz Diet will make you thinner, taller, smarter, richer, happier, hipper, leaner, meaner, keener, more attractive to members of every sex, and able to do those newspaper cryptoquote puzzles in one go.
Unknown Author
The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.
Louis Armstrong
The problem with jazz is that it is hidden in plain sight.
Peter Gordon
The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.
John Lewis
The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.
Herbie Hancock
The value of jazz still has to be clarified. People involve themselves with its superficialities without digging for its soul.
Stan Getz
There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. They are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence. These are the qualities I want to retain in my music.
Stan Getz
To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!
Louis Armstrong
To me if it’s anything, jazz is a verb-it’s more like a process than it is a thing.
Pat Metheny
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that’s not what I play. I play black classical music.
Nina Simone
Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can’t be taught.
Paul Desmond
You can’t explain jazz to anyone without losing the experience because it’s feeling, not words.
Bill Evans
You don’t rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.
Stan Getz
