Quotes on Jazz

It's not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

The E Street band casts a pretty wide net. Our influences go all the way back to the early primitive garage music, and also, we've had everything in the band from jazz players to Kansas City trumpet players to Nils Lofgren, one of the great rock guitarists in the world.

There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence.

Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.

Jazz is a music that is open enough to borrow from any other form of music, and has the strength to influence any other form of music.

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

A jazz musician is a combination orator, dialectician, mathematician, athlete, entertainer, poet, singer, dancer, diplomat, educator, student, comedian, artist, seducer, public masturbator, and general all-round good fellow.

[On bebop years] All I did was sing 'How High the Moon.' It seemed like the only song I ever sang.

Just because you're not a drummer doesn't mean you don't have to keep time.

If you got up on the bandstand at Minton's and couldn't play, you were not only going to be embarrassed by the people ignoring you or booing you, you might get your ass kicked.

Keith, how does it feel to be a genius?

I don't like to hear someone put down dixieland. Those people who say there's no music but bop are just stupid; it shows how much they don't know.

As long as I've been playing, they never say I done anything. They always say that some white guy did it.

At least one day out of the year all musicans should just put their instruments down, and give thanks to Duke Ellington.

Jazz is like blues with a shot of heroin!

The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.

I always say it's not my Arkestra, it belongs to some other force which wants certain things, to reach people.

One thing about excellence, it&Mac226;s an exclusive club. And it&Mac226;s only for those who really want to pay dues to the s--. My daddy told me when I was a boy: The only way you can be different from other people is to do some s-- they don't want to do.

Don t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.

Whatever she does to my songs, she always makes them sound better.