Jazz Music Quotes

I strive for honesty in playing what I feel.

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

Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.

Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.

Jazz is the music of the body.

One thing I like about jazz, kid, is that I don't know what's going to happen next. Do you?

I did, I was in Europe a lot. I would say, mid 20s to late 30s. Less so in the last ten or twelve years. Based on some political stuff and other things, I think I'm not the only musician, the only American jazz musician that's not going to Europe quite as much. I think we're seen a little differently in the world, unfortunately, than we were pre-Iraq invasion and things like that.

You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!

I was in New York, miserable because I was working supper clubs but I wasn't expressing myself. I was really unhappy with my life. I saw Max Roach again and he told me I didn't have to do things like that. He made me an honest woman on the stage. I have been performing in that tradition since. I feel that I'm a serious performer now whereas then I wanted to be but I didn't know how.

I believe in knowing all you can about the music and the people who made the music. I think it's much more important to know some good Miles Davis stories than to know how to play like Miles. I think you'll play better if you know some of the funny things he did than if you know the licks that he played.

Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.

Now as jazz musicians we're saying for this society, you can free up your imagination. You can proceed in an area without much information and you can function in an area without much information.

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.

I anticipated all the changes in jazz because they were all problematical things, that I was dealing with myself. In New York in the late '50s, there were a lot of experiments being made on how to avoid playing popular standards and how to get improvising out of those constricting formats.

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.

I just love all the music. My grandma was a church organist for 40 years, and she got me into jazz music and great songwriters, Harold Arlen, George Gershwin, all those folks. I can't do it, but I have a profound respect for it.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad.

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band's lead singer, Eric Burdon. "So you're the honky," she said, "who stole my song and got a hit out of it?

As Eric Dolphy said 'Once you play the music, it's in the air. It's gone'. And that's true. But when you record it, it comes back to haunt you sometimes.

I never even thought about whether or not they understand what I'm doing . . . the emotional reaction is all that matters as long as there's some feeling of communication, it isn't necessary that it be understood.

They didn't dictate to me as to what kind of music that they wanted me to play or what tunes, what musicians that I was going to use. They let me do my thing. That's one reason I stayed there for twenty-eight years.

[My] style evolved, not changed, but I think evolved as I grew and matured. I don't think there was any kind of change I did in a deliberate way - I think I just evolved.

What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!

If you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

Judy Garland was the singer I most wanted to sound like then, not to copy, but to get some of her soul and purity. A wonderful young voice.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

Thelonious Sphere Monk: there's not a more perfect name to fit his compositions than that name.

You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.

All a musician can do is to get closer to the source.

Like, I'm trying to make a statement that clean comedy is somehow better or loftier than dirty comedy, and I don't feel that way at all. I just think it's different. It's different. There's rock music, there's jazz music, there's reggae music: All of those forms are different.

Jazz is music made by and for people who have chosen to feel good in spite of conditions.

Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.

Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.

Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere!

I went to Juilliard in New York and used to do cabarets just for fun. Occasionally, I would get together with a jazz musician and play at a restaurant for cash. And I've done some background vocals for recording artists.

Many an American jazz musician has been beguiled by the lush melodies and sumptuous rhythms of Brazilian music, but Peter Sprague has taken the romance a good deal further than most.

For some reason that only a sociologist might be able to accurately explain, the Brazilian Press was extremely unkind to me, reporting only selective derogatory untruthful rumors (some of which are still around), harsh criticism, and unwarranted sarcasm. I was very hurt by this. It was such great disappointment... When I came back from Brazil at that time, I made a promise to myself that I would never, ever again sing in Brazil. So far [as of 2002], I have kept this promise, having declined each and every invitation or proposals to perform in Brazil. Once was enough!

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

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.

When I die, I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it.

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.

I was devastated. I'm still devastated to this day. When talent like that disappears in a flash, you can't believe it. You deny it. Max Roach, who, of course, played with him on all those EmArcy recordings, held a concert in Baltimore for Clifford long after Clifford died. Max was still disbelieving so many years later. The concert was supposed to bring closure. But Max was so outrageously emotional that day. He had quite a few eruptions and was very emotional about what had happened so many years earlier. Like everyone, he remained disbelieving.

The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his lifes work.

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.

I think I'll give them another chance. Americans deserve another chance with my music.

I may be prejudiced, but I believe that jazz music has the strongest healing potential, and it's not just because I play it and love it so much. I feel that it's the improvisation in jazz that makes it so strong as a healing tool, what each individual gives to a tune from their heart and their soul when they take a solo. It's all spontaneous, and it's all love, and from the heart.

If income was directly proportional to technical proficiency and education, classical and jazz musicians would be some of the most affluent people in the world.

You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.