Jazz Music Quotes - Page 3

• I have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.

  Sonny Rollins

  Musician, Way, Facts

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• I tell my students, 'It's an important tradition and you have to go back and hear this music and learn its language all the way through. How are you going to know what's new to play, if you haven't listened to everything that's old?'

  Jackie McLean

  Music, Play, Important

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• If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music.

  Charles Mingus

  Music, Reality, Escaping

  "An Open Letter To Miles Davis". Charles Mingus, Downbeat Magazine, November 30, 1955.

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• I played Big Band jazz music. I wasn't into rock and roll. I was just there because it was a living. I surprised everyone. I'm still surprising people.

  Bobby Vinton

  Rocks, Rock And Roll, People

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• Jazz music is America's past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves-to-come. It can remind us of where we fit on the time line of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Art, Past, Self

  Wynton Marsalis, Geoffrey Ward (2008). “Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life”, p.13, Random House

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• A goal is a dream with a finish line.

  Duke Ellington

  Inspirational, Music, Dream

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• Jazz isn't dead. It just smells funny.

  Frank Zappa

  Music, Smell, Free Jazz

  Song: Be-Bop Tango, 1974

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• Playing 'bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

  Duke Ellington

  Music, Missing You, Playing Jazz

  1954 In Look, 10 Aug.

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• People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.

  Cab Calloway

  Music, Mind, Ordinary

  "Of Minnie the Moocher and Me".

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• Do not fear mistakes. There are none.

  Miles Davis

  Life, Music, Beautiful

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• 

  Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

  Steve Martin

  Funny, Music, Dance

  66 Copy quote

• ...to me if it's anything, jazz is a verb-it's more like a process than it is a thing.

  Pat Metheny

  Musical, Jazz And Life, Verbs

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• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

  Aldous Huxley

  Motivational, Music, Wisdom

  Music at Night (1931) p. 17

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• When you're dead, you're done.

  Louis Armstrong

  Done, Jazz

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• This is so nice, it must be illegal.

  Fats Waller

  Music, Nice, Jazz

  Fats Waller (2001). “Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller: Performances in Transcription, 1927-1943”, p.3, A-R Editions, Inc.

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• We're not like pop musicians who have to perform the same top ten tunes every night of a tour.

  Oscar Peterson

  Night, Journey, Musician

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• My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life.

  Stan Getz

  Music, Spring, Perfection

  Stan Getz (2017). “Stan Getz - Omnibook: For B-flat Instruments”, p.2, Hal Leonard Corporation

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• In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That's a little bit too much.

  Miles Davis

  Music, Mistake, Europe

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• They tell me Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

  Edgar Wilson Nye

  Music, Sound, Opera

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• You can't play anything on a horn that Louis Armstrong hasn't played

  Miles Davis

  Music, Play, Horns

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• I believe that regardless of how many people you've listened to or emulated over the years, your sound is you and what you really feel inside.

  Clark Terry

  Music, Believe, Years

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• "If you don't make mistakes, you aren't really trying."

  Coleman Hawkins

  Success, Music, Fitness

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• At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Fashion, Believe

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• Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

  George Foreman

  Music, Sports, People

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• Eclecticism is the word. Like a jazz musician who creates his own style out of the styles around him, I play by ear.

  Ralph Ellison

  Play, Style, Musician

  Ralph Ellison, Maryemma Graham, Amritjit Singh (1995). “Conversations with Ralph Ellison”, p.364, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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