Jazz  Quotes

• Diana Krall - "I'm not really on a mission to tell anybody anything. I'd rather be figured out."
• Diana Krall - "What we do as artists is a combination of experience & imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear."
• Diana Krall - "I've sung a lot of emotional songs, but when you're writing it's very difficult to decide what to reveal."
• Diana Krall - "I work very hard at being the best musician I can be because I love it."
• Diana Krall - "You want the listener to find the song on their own, give too much away & it takes away from the imagination."
• Diana Krall - "The greatest thing about music is putting it out there for people to figure out."
• Diana Krall - "Love songs last because they are about feelings that don't change."

• Steve Lacy - "Risk is at the heart of Jazz. Every note we play is a risk."
• Steve Lacy - "I started in New Orleans music & played all through the history of Jazz."
• Steve Lacy - "I fell in love with Jazz when I was 12 listening to Duke Ellington & hearing a lot of Jazz in New York on the radio."
• Steve Lacy - "I still love the whole history of Jazz. The old things sound better than ever."
• Steve Lacy - "There's a lot of recreational Jazz going on, where cats learn a particular style & become sharks on somebody else's language."
• Steve Lacy - "Jazz musician is a combination entertainer, poet, singer, educator, student, artist, seducer & all-round good fellow."
• Steve Lacy - "Jazz is like wine. When it is new it's only for the experts, but when it gets older everybody wants it."
• Steve Lacy - "In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds."

• Yusef Lateef - "My music is Jazz."
• Peggy Lee - "What are you going to do when you love music? You can't stop."
• Michel Legrand - "To play piano is a significant part of my life, my existence. It fulfills a very physical & spiritual need for me."
• John Lennon - "Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it."
• Annie Lennox - "When you're successful, things have a momentum & you can't tell if you have created the momentum or it's creating you."
• Annie Lennox - "Music is an extraordinary vehicle for expressing very powerful emotions. That's what draws people towards it."
• Dave Liebman - "Art is constant tension & release. That is where artists live, between the two or at times, submerged in either."
• Dave Liebman - "A Jazz performance centers upon the process of creation. The final objective is not only the finished product, but the path & process taken towards it."
• Abbey Lincoln - "I loved Billie Holiday more than any other person other than myself on the stage."
• Abbey Lincoln - "I don't have to lay on the couch & see a therapist because my therapy is in art."
• Booker Little - "Jazz stresses less on technical exhibitionism & much more on emotional content."
• Joe Lovano - "You explore beautiful songs & create your own interpretation of them."
• Russell Malone - "You're just a little too hip for the room. It's not good to be too hip because two hips make an ass."
• Chuck Mangione - "I don't believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from."
• Chuck Mangione - "I can count on one hand the number of instrumental hits there have been over the last 10 years."
• Herbie Mann - "You don't have to live the blues to play the blues."
• Herbie Mann - "Music allows the great opportunity to play with people you love."
• Herbie Mann - "If you want to play somebody's music, you'd better go into his house."
• Herbie Mann - "If you keep your head in the sand, you don't know where the kick's coming from."
• Pat Martino - "Jazz is the continual pulsation of the now."
• Branford Marsalis - "Jazz is so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself."
• Branford Marsalis - "Jazz fans love Miles & I love him for a myriad of reasons, but the overviews are always too simplistic."
• Branford Marsalis - "Pop doesn't really look back. It can't. What makes pop work is simplicity."
• Branford Marsalis - "You don't know what you like, you like what you know. In order to know what you like, you have to know everything."
• Branford Marsalis - "We quest for the perfect performance & every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life."

• Wynton Marsalis - "Jazz music is the power of now."
• Wynton Marsalis - "A beat is a moment in the life a groove."
• Wynton Marsalis - "Don't settle for style. Succeed in substance."
• Wynton Marsalis - "I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel."
• Wynton Marsalis - "Nothing else will ever capture the democratic process in sound as perfectly as Jazz."
• Wynton Marsalis - "Find the best teachers, listen to the finest playing & try to emulate that. Be true to the music."
• Wynton Marsalis - "Jazz isn't the kind of music you're going to learn in 3 or 4 years or get because you have talent for music."
• Wynton Marsalis - "Music does not come to you. You have to come to it & you'll walk away with something you didn't have before."
• Wynton Marsalis - "In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making any ol' thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammer and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others."