Jazz Musician Quotes - Page 3

• It's taken me all my life to learn what not to play.

  Dizzy Gillespie

  Music, Taken, Play

  Quoted in N Hentoff Jazz Is (1978).

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• Women and rhythm-section first!?

  Jaco Pastorius

  Music, Bass Players, Firsts

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• In classical music, love is based on bitin' -- imitation. It's not based on interpretation. A jazz musician, if he plays someone else's song, has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.

  Todd Boyd

  Song, Responsibility, Love Is

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• I will never again play anything that does not have social significance. We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we are master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we've been through.

  Max Roach

  Music, Play, Skills

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• Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night.

  Miles Kington

  Work, Night, Musician

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• 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.

  Branford Marsalis

  Halloween, Successful, Community

  "Branford Marsalis: It's All About The Band". Interview with Russ Musto, www.allaboutjazz.com. January 12, 2005.

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• 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.

  Donald Fagen

  Kids, Years, Play

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• Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.

  Glenn Ligon

  Decision, Musician, Jazz

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Jazz musicians are the coolest people on the planet. Can I have some cool?

  Jon Stewart

  People, Musician, Jazz

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• One of the most obvious aspects of the music to people who know jazz is: How does it feel in the swing? These are things that are very subtle and that jazz musician appreciate in a particular way. I appreciate the way Tommy Flanagan swings, the way that Barry Harris swings, the great pulse that Hank Jones and Bill Evans have - end every one of them is different.

  Chuck Israels

  Swings, People, Appreciate

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• 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.

  Donald Byrd

  School, Cat, Rocks

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• I have always loved jazz music and as a teen growing up in New York City and then later on as an adult have great memories of the jazz clubs that were all located on 52nd Street. I still catch as many jazz shows as I can when I am in New York. And when I perform, I have my jazz quartet by my side. Jazz musicians keep things spontaneous and very "live," which is the way I like to perform.

  Tony Bennett

  New York, Growing Up, Memories

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time.

  Wynton Marsalis

  New York, Philosophical, Home

  Interview with Vickie Karp, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 18, 2009.

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• Many an American jazz musician has been beguiled by the lush melodies and sumptuous rhythms of Brazilian music, but Peter Sprague has taken the romance a good deal further than most.

  Andrew S. Gilbert

  Taken, Romance, Musician

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• I don't listen to a lot of music when I have my free time. But I'll go to a jazz club and have a drink and listen to a good jazz musician. Or sometimes in the morning, if I want to put myself in a good mood, I'll put on some Latin music.

  Joshua Bell

  Morning, Latin, Musician

  "Joshua Bell’s Virtuoso Reality". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. May 2011.

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• To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Mean, Musician, Needs

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• When I did the Abyssinian mass, I went through the whole history of the church music and the gospel music, even with the Anglo American hymns, the Afro American hymns, the spirituals and how it developed, up to Thomas Dorsey and the Dixie Hummingbirds, going through the history of the music, jazz musicians.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Church Music, Hymns, Musician

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• 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.

  Sonny Rollins

  Drinking, Musician, Clubs

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• But you listen to Coltrane and that's something human, something that's about elevation. It's like making love to a woman. It's about something of value, it's not just loud. It doesn't have that violent connotation to it. I wanted to be a jazz musician so bad, but I really couldn't. There was no way I could figure out to learn how to play.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Play, Making Love, Musician

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• Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.

  Colin Greenwood

  Musician, Groups, Tools

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I don't like heroin, unless you're a jazz musician and then you have to be on it because jazz is the sound of heroin.

  John Waters

  Musician, Sound, Jazz

  Source: www.timeout.com

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• The worst thing about the life of a jazz musician on the road is getting to the gig. Once you're there and playing, it's marvelous.

  Dave Brubeck

  Musician, Gigs, Jazz

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• A lot of times, jazz musicians try to educate people. What other genre does that?

  Robert Glasper

  People, Trying, Musician

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• 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 lifes work.

  Ahmet Ertegun

  Brother, People, Musician

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• Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Book, Cities, Kansas City

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