Jazz Quotes

Excerpted from Basic Musicianship

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Archie Shepp - "Music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential." [P]
Bobby Short - "Life is tough & if you're creative, it's tougher." [P]
Wayne Shorter - "Music is interior decoration." [P]
Wayne Shorter - "Clouds float in the same pattern only once." [P]
Wayne Shorter - "Your humanity is your instrument." [P]
Wayne Shorter - "Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz." [P]

Troy (Trombone Shorty) Andrews - "I'm a big fan of music, a student. I just wanna learn & keep enhancing my education about Jazz." [P]
Janis Siegel - "Something just grabs you about a song." [P]
Beverly Sills - "You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try." [P]
Horace Silver - "Jazz music can relax, soothe and uplift the mind when you absorb it." [P]
Horace Silver - "9/10 of Jazz playing is improvisation. For this, gaining a profound harmonic music background is essential." [P]
Horace Silver - "We open our minds, stretch forth, take chances & venture out musically to arrive at something new & different."
Horace Silver - "Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate in order to get the most out of it. You must absorb it." [P]
Carly Simon - "You usually can't tell what's inspiring until you look back on it." [P]
Nina Simone - "Music is a gift and a burden I've had since I can remember who I was." [P]
Nina Simone - "Jazz is not just music, it's a way of life, it's a way of being, a way of thinking." [P]
Nina Simone - "Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream."
Zoot Sims - "As long as you've got your horn in your mouth, you're developing." [P]

Homer Simpson - "Ahhh - those Jazz guys are just makin' that stuff up!" [P]
Frank Sinatra - "I'm gonna live till I die." [P]
Frank Sinatra - "You gotta love livin', baby, 'cause dyin' is a pain in the ass." [P]
Frank Sinatra - "May you live to be 100 & may the last voice you hear be mine." [P]
Frank Sinatra - "Whatever else has been said about me personally is unimportant. When I sing, I believe I'm honest."
Carol Sloane - "A great song doesn't need to be jazzed up." [P]
Bessie Smith - "I've been poor and I've been rich and rich is better." [P]
Dr Lonnie Smith - "I let my body play what's in my heart. I play life instead of notes. I play what I lived." [P]
Jimmy Smith - "Everybody has somebody that they patterned themselves after." [P]
Keely Smith - "I loved the feeling that I got singing." [P]
Marvin "Smitty" Smith - "The best Jazz soloists have always sounded like drummers." [P]
Tommy Smith - "Your horn is your passport to the world."
Tommy Smith - "Tomorrow you'll wish you had practiced harder today."

W. Eugene Smith - "Passion is in all great searches and is necessary to all creative endeavors." [P]
Willie "the Lion" Smith - "Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen & be over eighteen."

John Philip Sousa - "Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing."
John Philip Sousa - "Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains." [P]
Luciana Souza - "What I look for in concert is a connection with the audience." [P]
Esperanza Spalding - "Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me." [P]
Esperanza Spalding - "Jazz has become this grown arrogant adult, seemingly entitled to the respect and the inheritance of it's conceivers." [P]
James Spaulding - "I have no elitist concepts about Jazz. I would not be the musician I am today without experiencing invaluable music styles that are at the roots of African American black life & culture." [P]
Jo Stafford - "When rock music came in, I wasn't bitter about it. I was puzzled." [P]
Mary Stallings - "Audiences are smart. They are not going to come out to see you unless you are honest." [P]
Mike Stern - "Sometimes there are no gigs, but the main thing is still the music." [P]
Mike Stern - "I want the music to connect to people; reach people every time I perform."
Mike Stern - "I want people to walk away with the same joy, hope and love that I put into my music." [P]
Mike Stern - "The deeper you get into the music allows the ability to appreciate art and all other forms of expression."
Billy Strayhorn - "All music is beautiful." [P]
Maxine Sullivan- "I can't sing it straight. I have no choice but to swing it." [P]
Tierney Sutton - "I just fell in love with the integrity of the music and that was it." [P]
Tierney Sutton - "Look at the tune and not make the same statement that has been made a million times." [P]
Tierney Sutton - "The way a band works is a metaphor for all sorts of collaborative & larger enterprises that people do."
Steve Swallow - "I don't meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing & composing as meditative acts. [P]
Gabor Szabo - "A musician's responsibility is to get as much of his art across to the public as possible." [P]
Lew Tabackin - "When you play flute in Jazz, you have a chance to create your own tradition." [P]
Grady Tate - "All the great Jazz artists were my influences." [P]
Art Tatum - "There is no such thing as a wrong note." [P]
Art Tatum - "You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!"
Billy Taylor - "Jazz is America's classical music." [P]
Billy Taylor - "Players are coming from other backgrounds: rock, folk, ethnic music. It's changing Jazz for the better."
Cecil Taylor - "Improvisation is the ability to talk to oneself." [P]
Cecil Taylor - "I discovered very early that it wasn't quite enough for me to imitate people."
Cecil Taylor - "You must surrender whatever preconceptions you have about music if you're really interested in it."

Jack Teagarden - "All that I've played, all that I've sung, I couldn't have done any other way." [P]
Norma Teagarden - "You just sort of have to play the way you are." [P]
Clark Terry - "Imitate, assimilate & innovate." [P]
Clark Terry - "Your sound is you & what you really feel inside." [P]
Sue Terry - "Music gives us a lot of things and it only wants one thing back... your attention." [P]
Grace Testani - "Breathe... breathe a lot." [P]
Twyla Tharp - "Art is the only way to run away without leaving home." [P]
Toots Thielemans - "Being a Jazz musician is not a rose garden!" [P]
Toots Thielemans - "Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music." [P]
Ed Thigpen - "Musicians should never forget we're blessed. We have a special gift that people enjoy through us." [P]
Hunter S. Thompson - "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
Hunter S. Thompson - "The music business is a cruel & shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves & pimps run free & good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." [P]
Lucky Thompson - "Music is the most interesting thing in the world." [P]
Lucky Thompson - "I feel I have only scratched the surface of what I know I am capable of doing."
Henry Threadgill - "Music should go right through you, leave some of itself inside you, and take some of you with it when it leaves." [P]
Bobby Timmons - "Every mornin' finds me moanin' I'm alone and crying the Blues." [P]
J.R.R. Tolkien - "Not all those who wander are lost." [P]
Mel Torme - "Jazz and love are the hardest things to describe from rationale." [P]
Lennie Tristano - "The hippest thing you can do is not play at all. Just listen." [P]
Lennie Tristano - "It's not instant composing; it's not following any kind of a formula. All you do is hear music in your head and reproduce it." [P]
Steve Turre - "The Blues is never old." [P]
Steve Turre - "You have to understand the styles and it's good to study those that came before us."
Stanley Turrentine- "There's so many ways you can hit one note." [P]
McCoy Tyner - "Jazz is not gonna be a dinosaur and stay around in one form." [P]
McCoy Tyner - "You have to go through stages of discipline before you can assume the responsibility of freedom." [P]
Hsun Tzu - "Music is the great arbiter of the world, the key to central harmony & a necessary requirement of human emotion."

Sarah Vaughan - "There are notes between notes, you know." [P]
Sarah Vaughan - "When I sing, trouble can sit right on my shoulder & I don't even notice." [P]
Joe Venuti - "If you're going to make a mistake, make it loud so everybody else sounds wrong." [P]
Roseanna Vitro - "If you are going to dream, dream big." [P]
Mal Waldron - "I start out with a big tree, then shave and shave to find the perfect toothpick." [P]
Bennie Wallace - "Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else's personality, that is not art." [P]

Fats Waller - "If you don't know what it is, don't mess with it."
Fats Waller - "You get that right tickin' rhythm, man & its ON!" [P]
Jack Walrath- "I have always seen Jazz as innovative." [P]
Dinah Washington - "There is only one heaven, one earth and one queen (me) Queen Elizabeth is an impostor." [P]
Earnie Watts - "Just because you're totally acoustic doesn't mean you have to play old music." [P]
Jeff "Tain" Watts - "I'm just trying to create context for me to improve my musicianship." [P]
Chick Webb - "I can't understand the pain God gave me, I can't understand my sickness, but that's secondary. The main thing is, the Lord gave me the talent to play drums. He gave me some years to play. That's what I wanted to do." [P]
Noel Webb - "Artists should dive into every form of creative art and literature they can get their hands on, then explore every aspect." [P]
Ben Webster - "I don't want to play out of another man's bag." [P]
George Wein - "I got more publicity for not doing a festival than for doing the festival." [P]
Orson Welles - "With the birth of the first artist, came the inevitable afterbirth... the first critic." [P]
Frank Wess - "I think you can play anything you wanna as long as you take the audience along with you." [P]
Kenny Wheeler - "I find playing free with people I like very therapeutic." [P]
Paul Whiteman - "Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains." [P]
Cootie Williams - "Armstrong changed all the brass players around, but after Bird, all instruments had to change - drums, piano, bass, trombones, trumpets, saxophones, everything." [P]
Jessica Williams - "If you must listen to bad music, please use headphones." [P]
Joe Williams - "You can't rehearse a blues darlin'."
Joe Williams - "The louder they [the band] play the softer I sing."
Joe Williams - "Jazz has an aesthetic intimacy, a romantic transference."
Joe Williams - "It's not that you want to sing, it's that you have to sing." [P]
Joe Williams - "Musicians have the intimacy of bringing two people together & the aesthetic, romantic transference."
John Williams - "Composing music is hard work." [P]

Mary Lou Williams - "I heard someone say 'What's that kid doing here? Call your piano player & let's get started.'"
Mary Lou Williams - "For most dates I was paid the sum of $1 per hr & they always tipped me at the end of the night."
Mary Lou Williams - "Many people forget that Jazz, no matter what form it takes, must come from the heart as well as the mind." [P]
Mary Lou Williams - "I remember not eating for practically a month several times, but we were very, very happy because the music was so interesting and you forgot to eat anyway." [P]

Tony Williams - "Composing makes me feel like I've finally gotten all the way up the ladder as a musician." [P]
Tony Williams - "I've studied all my musical life, but learning is only good if you do something constructive with it." [P]
Anthony Wilson - "Writing is allowing the musical idea to speak for itself." [P]
Larry Willis - "Every time I sit at the piano, the more I learn about it, the more I don't know." [P]
Cassandra Wilson - "I'm always looking for ways to develop as a Jazz artist, to find different ways of using my voice." [P]
Cassandra Wilson - "I cringed when I heard myself described as a Jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a Jazz vocalist."
Cassandra Wilson - "I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician."
Nancy Wilson - "I wanted to do the music, but not at the expense of being happy." [P]
Gerald Wilson - "We have twelve tones to use in music. If you're just using four or five, what are you going to do with the other seven?" [P]
D. W. Winnicott - "Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide." [P]
Steve Winwood - "It could be my British need for discipline that makes me admire the American appetite for freedom & passion."
Stevie Wonder - "Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn't mean he lacks vision." [P]
Phil Woods - "If it ain't fun, I want no part of it man. That's the reason I play." [P]
Victor Wooten - "Never lose the groove to find a note." [P]
Reggie Workman - "The majority of people mistakenly feel they don't need a live musical experience." [P]
Lester Young - "You have a mentor or teacher and you learn all he can show you." [P]
Lester Young - "You can have tone & technique but without originality you ain't really nowhere. Gotta be original." [P]
Frank Zappa- "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible." [P]
Frank Zappa- "Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
Frank Zappa- "Wisdom is not knowledge, knowledge is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not music... music is best."
Joe Zawinul - "Music can't save the world, but can make one a little calmer." [P]
Joe Zawinul - "I am an improviser, I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it, it's all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised."
Eliot Zigmund - "My role as a drummer is as a team player to enhance what is going on around me." [P]
Mike Zwerin - "Jazz musicians have some outlaw in them somewhere." [P]

More Jazz quotes & quotations:

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