That's kind of like how jazz is sometimes. You're out there predicting the future, and no one believes you.

I cringed when I heard myself described as a Jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a Jazz vocalist.

A lot of jazz artists think people should like what they're doing just because it's jazz. I don't buy that.

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

I didn't really grow up on hip-hop. Ella Fitzgerald and the old school jazz divas are more my comfort zone.

Clifford Brown was in the jazz circles considered to be probably the greatest trumpet player who ever lived.

I've always wanted to record a jazz record. I did one in the '70s with Barbara Carroll. It's been a journey.

The whole reason for Jazz at the Philharmonic was to take it to places where I could break down segregation.

I always think of music as interior decoration. So, if you have all kinds of music, you are fully decorated!

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

I have two main bass guitars, and my main bass is a four-string 1964 Fender Jazz, and I've named it Justine.

I took the frets out of my bass after I was getting into jazz a lot and I wanted to have that upright sound.

The genius of our country is improvisation, and jazz reflects that. It's our great contribution to the arts.

By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with.

Me as an artist, I've ventured off into doing all types of music. I'll do a jazz album, you know what I mean.

The history of all big jazz bands shows was, first they played for dancing, and then they played for singing.

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

I was blessed to work with The Jazz Messengers when the two piano players were Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

I'm really getting to appreciate traditional jazz now - the New Orleans stuff - a lot more than I did before.

Playing the sax and then enjoying jazz music, man - it's like I learned how to find words inside of the beat.

Over time, I've loved jazz, Miles Davis and Chet Baker, then Janis and Jimi and Creedence, then classic rock.

Miles got a mystique about him-plus he's at the top of his profession. And he's got way, way, way more money.

It's sort of what jazz would be if it stopped being snobby and what rock would be if it stopped being stupid.

The radio is playing jazz, and I listen to the sound of the trumpet playing a solo until I become that sound.

I know of musicians who have played together for decades who hate each other. The Modern Jazz Quartet for one.

I always say it's not my Arkestra, it belongs to some other force which wants certain things, to reach people.

It's not the style that motivates me, as much as an attitude of openness that I have when I go into a project.

Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz.

I keep reverting (to Duke Ellington), he to me is the greatest ever and my favorite jazz philosopher, as such.

Jazz is a democratic musical form. We take our respective instruments & collectively create a thing of beauty.

Well I went to New Orleans to cover the jazz festival for Trio, it's this new arts channel, it's really great.

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

The first thing is, jazz is one of the few things to let you know that there is a God and there is a creation.

Every conversation is a form of Jazz. The activity of instantaneous creation is as ordinary to us as breathing.

You know I want to sing for people, I want to jazz people up I want to make new music that they've never heard.

[Billy Strayhorn] understood the violin as well as he understood Jazz, and he wrote for the violin as a violin.

I've never been on a board, but I just went on the board for Jazz at Lincoln Center. I'm very happy about that.

I started playing trumpet when I was 11 years old. All I wanted to be was a jazz trumpet player when I grew up.

I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.

When I joined the band I didn't know any of the tunes, and when I left the band I didn't know any of the tunes!

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

Whenever there's a change with Jazz & its aesthetics, it's almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

One of the things jazz has always excelled at is translating the reality of the times through its musical prism.

I had heard blues and jazz all my life but I was never aware that it was associated with nightclubs and drinking.

I do modern jazz and contemporary combined. I like to feel strong, flexible, and so there is stretching involved.

I don't know where jazz is going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens.

Jazz has to work. It has to play with the audience and with the marketplace. I think that is relevant to business.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

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