Explore Quotes on Jazz

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

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.

The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.

The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It's in New Orleans music, it's in jazz, it's in country music, it's in gospel.

Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

I had to figure out how to survive in New York, and most of my time was occupied in getting an apartment and getting money. A lot of older jazz guys looked out for me and found me gigs and places to stay.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

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.

Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance.

People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it's jazz music-it's not easy for them to get to it. I don't want them ever to feel that I'm taking their presence lightly.

My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

If it hadn't been for Jazz, there wouldn't be no rock and roll.

I'm a musician at heart. I know I'm not really a singer. I couldn't compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.

If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out.