Jazz And Blues Quotes

• Blues is to jazz what yeast is to bread--without it, it's flat.

  Carmen McRae

  Inspirational, Music, Yeast

  57 Copy quote

• Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

  Ornette Coleman

  Music, Memorable, Night

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• Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

  B. B. King

  Brother, School, College

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

  Louis Armstrong

  Music, Jazz, Asks

  "Jazz Giants of the 20th Century/ Taglines". www.imdb.com. 2007.

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

  George Gershwin

  Music, Jazz Hands, Cool Jazz

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

  Charlie Parker

  Music, Art, Reality

  Quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955)

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• Blues and soul and jazz music has so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.

  Christina Aguilera

  Pain, Passion, Soul

  57 Copy quote

• The blues is the foundation, and it's got to carry the top. The other part of the scene, the rock 'n' roll and the jazz, are the walls of the blues.

  Luther Allison

  Wall, Rocks, Rock N Roll

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• What makes my approach special is that I do different things. I do jazz, blues, country music and so forth. I do them all, like a good utility man.

  Ray Charles

  Country, Men, Special

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• I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Art, Opportunity

  "The Best of the Music Makers". Book by George Thomas Simon, 1979.

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• It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives it most distinctive characteristics.

  James Weldon Johnson

  Music, May, Characteristics

  James Weldon Johnson “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man”, W. W. Norton & Company

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  If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

  Keith Richards

  Guitar, Rock And Roll, Rocks

  70 Copy quote

• The whole of life itself expresses the blues. That's why I always say the blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling and understanding. The blues can be about anything pertaining to the facts of life. The blues call on God as much as a spiritual song do.

  Willie Dixon

  Song, Understanding, Feelings

  "I am the blues: the Willie Dixon story".

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

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Daughter, Mother

  "At the Jazz Band Ball: Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene". Book by Nat Hentoff, 2010.

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• In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me.

  Jelly Roll Morton

  World, Peculiar, Strange

  11 Copy quote

• I find Indian music very funky. I mean it's very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it's the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.

  John McLaughlin

  Music, School, Mean

  58 Copy quote

• When I die, I want them to play The Black and Crazy Blues, I want to be cremated, put in a bag of pot and I want beautiful people to smoke me and hope they got something out of it.

  Rahsaan Roland Kirk

  Music, Beautiful, Crazy

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• Being materialistic is part of the hip-hop community's nature, because jazz and blues and rock 'n' roll, when they started out in the urban communities, were about the American Dream, and the lack of opportunity in that structure. So they talked about everything - uplifting and getting what is perceived as success in America.

  Russell Simmons

  Uplifting, Dream, Opportunity

  Interview with Nathan Rabin, www.avclub.com. September 26, 2002.

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• The jazz and blues clubs are like the jazz and blues musicians - they're disappearing.

  Buddy Guy

  Musician, Clubs, Jazz

  "Blues guitarist Buddy Guy". "Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. June 7, 2012.

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• When I was a teenager, I really didn't like loud rock music. I listened to jazz and blues and folk music. I've always preferred acoustic music. And it was only, I suppose, by the time Jethro Tull was getting underway that we did let the music begin to have a harder edge, in particular with the electric guitar being alongside the flute.

  Ian Anderson

  Teenager, Rocks, Guitar

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• I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and am a product of a family that were jazz aficionados and also very interested in progressive politics. And so I had a lot of artists and musicians in my home. Lots of Latin music, folk, and jazz and blues, bluegrass-type of stuff. Painters and stuff like that.

  Jack Waters

  Latin, Home, Artist

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Bruce Katz is a spectacular talent! He's a brilliant composer and arranger who uses uncommon and unique musical intelligence to redefine jazz and blues far beyond the pale of the accepted definitions of keyboard competence. Whether on piano or organ, when you hear Bruce Katz you know it's him, unmistakably and uniquely.

  Larry Coryell

  Unique, Piano, Musical

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• Jazz and blues fests are everywhere now, and Americana is going strong on college radio. What I'm hearing is an appreciation of real music.

  Bonnie Raitt

  Appreciation, Strong, Real

  4 Copy quote

• I loved music from the age of eight. Jazz and blues. But also Little Richard and Elvis Presley.

  Bryan Ferry

  Eight, Age, Littles

  "Hot Tracks: Bryan Ferry's New Solo Album, Avonmore". Interview with Lisa Robinson, www.vanityfair.com. November, 2014.

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• Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues.

  Willie Nelson

  Swings, Bob, Jazz

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