Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?
I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.
Jazz musicians, in a way, are nerds. We are so in our world.
My foundation is jazz. I do all the things jazz musicians do.
I have a large collection of biographies about jazz musicians.
I've met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they're all funny.
Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.
A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?
Jazz musicians have always tended to have cult followings, which is pretty wonderful.
This is what really makes real jazz musicians: people coming out with their own voice.
Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.
I loved Art Tatum! And, through him, and other different jazz musicians, I actually found my technique.
Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.
Certain jazz musicians just copy what was done 100 years ago. The music won't grow if nobody takes a risk.
I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.
Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.
I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully.
Jazz scares me. I've witnessed so many incredible singers and jazz musicians. Pop and soul music have always been the things that I felt like I could do.
Musicians like to converse. There's always interesting conversation with musicians - with classical musicians, with jazz musicians, musicians in general.
Jazz musicians don't make any money, so I might as well make some on the market. I pick my own stocks - Microsoft, Dell - the tech stocks, the breadwinners.
You had many jazz musicians who lived in the United States, who had a hard time being accepted over here and had to play in sort of these inferior type dives.
I have seen great jazz musicians die obscure and drinking themselves to death and not really being able to get any work and working in small, funky jazz clubs.
One of the things that's clear to me from interviews that I've read is that the more popular successful jazz musicians had audiences above and beyond the music community.
We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.
Lars Ulrich is not a jazz drummer, but he grew up listening to jazz. Why? Because his father, Torben - an incredible tennis player - loved jazz. Jazz musicians used to stay at their house.
Jazz was the beginning of rhythm music, which developed into rock and roll. But what the jazz musicians lost because they were so far from their homeland was the intricate rhythms of African music.
I think my intention was there, and my love for the music was apparent. And there are very few singers who get up and desire to take the kinds of risks that jazz musicians routinely need to be taking.
Even when I was studying musical theater in college, after I would have theory at 8 in the morning and be on crew for productions until 11 at night, from 12 A.M. to 3 A.M. I was hanging out with jazz musicians.
Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.
I'd been studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. I hadn't been doing well, because I was sitting in with jazz musicians at night - it's hard to read Heidegger, but it's especially hard if you're half asleep.
My great inspiration has always been Studs Terkel, who is a wonderful American oral historian. He was a radio DJ at first, interviewed a lot of jazz musicians, and at some point started to interview Americans about work.
Hamp would ask me about tempos in the band: 'Jacquet,' he'd say, 'knock off that tempo.' A lot of jazz musicians didn't prefer to play for dancers, which was their loss, really. But good jazz has always had that dance feel.
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life's work.
We've now got a whole generation of jazz musicians who have been brought up with hip-hop. We've grown up alongside rappers and DJs; we've heard this music all our life. We are as fluent in J Dilla and Dr Dre as we are in Mingus and Coltrane.
I want them to come away with discovering the music inside them. And not thinking about themselves as jazz musicians, but thinking about themselves as good human beings, striving to be a great person and maybe they'll become a great musician.
I never gave up on that idea, you know, that jazz musicians have the same opportunity as everybody else and that it's what you put on that record that makes the difference whether you sell it or not or are able to get it into people's households.
What I can say is that for may years jazz musicians had to go to Europe, for instance, to be respected and to be sort of treated not in a discriminatory way. I don't think there is anything controversial about me saying that. This is just a fact.
I really thought I was gonna have a straight gig. But these jazz musicians put their arms around me time and again and said, 'Hey, young fella, you're one of us. Come with us.' That's a big deal when you're young and looking for your way in the world.
I really love Dinah Washington and anything live from her - she had some of the greatest jazz musicians in the whole world, and sometimes she would be with a big band, and sometimes she'd just be on stage with a muted trumpet, upright bass, and a piano.
Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.
I took some lessons as a kid but trained myself by ear. I did it the way jazz musicians used to learn years ago, which is to play records and slow them down to figure out the notes. At first I tried to imitate Red Garland, who was my favorite jazz pianist.
People like to compartmentalise music, especially African-American music, but it's really one thing. One very wide thing. I mean, it's like all those great records by Marvin Gaye and James Brown back in the day - there are tonnes of jazz musicians playing on them.
People need to realize that even the greatest jazz musicians, when they listen to jazz, they're not like, analyzing it and deconstructing it - they're enjoying it. It's like listening to any other style of music. It's saying something to you, and you kind of just absorb it.
I was being ridiculed for going to school... But, you see, I had looked hard at the other musicians and the whole show-business scene... They were doing with jazz musicians what they usually reserved for rock n' roll cats: making them overnight successes, then overnight antiques.
Mum left school at 15, and after a few years of modelling and dating jazz musicians, was married by 21 to my father, Mike Taylor, a journalist on the 'Daily Mirror.' They had my brother and me pretty quickly and had split up by the time I was two. I don't really have any memories of them as a couple.
In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.
For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.
You know, as kids were weren't jazz musicians or anything. But, the circle of friends and the neighborhood I lived in, we were really big Rush freaks and Yes fans. We would listen to 'Close to the Edge' and 'Hemispheres' and '2112' - the more artsy, progressive stuff. Some of the guys were into King Crimson and Genesis and all that.
There were two things I discovered when I toured with Snoop. One was that the band was all jazz musicians. The second was to instil in me a respect for other styles of music. From then on, whenever I played a new kind of music, I came with the same kind of open mind. What are they trying to do? What are they hearing? How do they see music?