Explore Quotes on Jazz

The worst crime is faking it.

You ask: What is it that philosophers have called qualitative states? I answer, only half in jest: As Louis Armstrong said when asked what jazz is, 'If you got to ask, you ain't never gonna get to know.'

I'm basically a cocktail jazz kind of pianist. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a very good keyboard player. People think I think I'm good. I think I'm a very poor piano player.

If there was no black man there would be no Rock'n'Roll. The beat, the rhythms of Africa are what created Rock'n'Roll and Jazz.

Get up from that piano. You hurtin' its feelings.

Jazz: Music invented for the torture of imbeciles.

The jazz trombone is a magical experience particularly to hear and listen too.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

Jazz to me is the spirit of freedom. I mean real freedom. Freedom to explore. Freedom to express. Freedom to pour out your guts.

You don't rehearse jazz to death to get the camera angles.

Life is a lot like jazz. It's best when you improvise.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.

Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.

And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.

I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music.

Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.

We want to show how hip-hop, which kind of fuels today's basketball stars, is directly related to jazz.

It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry. If they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere and keep on working until the work is done... I bet there isn't a single highly successful person who has not depended on grit. Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that's what grit allows you to do.