Jazz Quotes - page 2

Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics. (Ken Burns)

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

Ken Burns

I don't regard myself as a great classical or jazz pianist. I like country music, but I'm not a great player. I just like music. Drums 'n' bass is pretty exciting and I'd love to explore it.

Keith Emerson

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

Mike Figgis

So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument.

Miroslav Vitous

The public, hearing pop music, is, without knowing it, also soaking up jazz.

Norman Granz

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

Philip Levine

It seems that jazz is more cerebral and more mathematical in a sense.

Rita Coolidge

I couldn't get my album played over the so-called smooth jazz stations. Jazz stations would not play it. You don't always know who you're making that soul connection with.

Roy Ayers

I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.

Sonny Rollins

There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time. (Sonny Rollins)

I still love the whole history of jazz. The old things sound better than ever.

Steve Lacy

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz - everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.

Evelyn Waugh

There's no future without the past and anybody who doesn't really understand where jazz has come from has no right to try to direct where it's going.

Cannonball Adderley

I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such.

Cannonball Adderley

Don't believe that jazz about there's nothing you can do, "turn on and drop out, man" - because you've got to turn on and drop in, or they're going to drop all over you.

John Lennon

An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

George Gershwin

Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

Frank Zappa

I ... started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that's just the way it came out.

Nat King Cole

When I was young, I never bought records because my brother Joseph played saxophone and had a record player. I loved listening to his records: The Dorsey Brothers, Duke Ellington, all the big American jazz bands, and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, Ernestine Anderson, and Kitty White, a singer from the US who was a friend of Nina Simone. Nobody in America seems to know about her, but she was quite popular in South Africa.

Miriam Makeba

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite. (Theodor Adorno)

Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.

Theodor Adorno

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

Françoise Sagan

That's the thing about jazz: it's free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Billy Crystal

I took the frets out of my bass after I was getting into jazz a lot and I wanted to have that upright sound.

Jaco Pastorius

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