Jazz Quotes - Page 29

• I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.

  Nina Simone

  Music, Rights, People

  118 Copy quote

• Talent is a burden not a joy. I am not of this planet. I do not come from you. I am not like you.

  Nina Simone

  Music, Joy, Talent

  247 Copy quote

• Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," a song that was written for Simone, she confronted the band's lead singer, Eric Burdon. "So you're the honky," she said, "who stole my song and got a hit out of it?

  Nina Simone

  Music, Song, Misunderstood

  35 Copy quote

• My mom would have liked it that I patterned myself more after Jimmy Reed.

  Zoot Sims

  Music, Mom, Reeds

  6 Copy quote

• Ninety-five percent of my audience was white.

  Zoot Sims

  Music, White, Ninety

  7 Copy quote

• A prophet is not without honor except in his own country among his own people.

  Sun Ra

  Music, Country, People

  55 Copy quote

• I am a musician, but I'm another type of musician.

  Sun Ra

  Music, Type, Musician

  11 Copy quote

• People behind the Iron curtain have such an incredible image of America and jazz. I expected to find a Gerry Mulligan or Miles Davis on every corner...I almost expected a Shorty Rogers to deliver the milk, a Bud Shank to be the mailman.

  Gabor Szabo

  Music, Iron, America

  4 Copy quote

• When I was studying at Berklee, I got the feeling I couldn't play the [guitar] at all, because I could not use my own things as they didn't fit any set pattern. When I joined [Chico Hamilton], he helped me immensely to develop my own style. He never forced me in any set way. At all times, he encouraged me to be myself on the instrument.

  Gabor Szabo

  Music, Guitar, Play

  4 Copy quote

• Many jazz musicians affect a misunderstood-genius air when they play, which alienates the audience and breaks down the communications of the music. A musician's responsibility is to get as much of his art across as possible. Musicians used to be kept when only the rich could afford art, but now practically everyone can afford radios, stereo equipment, concert tickets, etc. A musician must learn to communicate to survive.

  Gabor Szabo

  Music, Art, Communication

  8 Copy quote

• My dream is to do whatever I want without any interference from the record company.

  Sarah Vaughan

  Music, Dream, Records

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  29 Copy quote

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• Judy Garland was the singer I most wanted to sound like then, not to copy, but to get some of her soul and purity. A wonderful young voice.

  Sarah Vaughan

  Music, Voice, Soul

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  20 Copy quote

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• Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.

  Roy Haynes

  Music, Vocalist, Charlie

  5 Copy quote

• At first I didn't understand what [Thelonious Monk] was doing, but I went back again, and what I can say about Monk is that I heard ancient Africa in his music. When he played, it was like a ballet. He captured the sound of the universe. Monk could take a triad, a simple chord, and make it sound dissonant. I'm sure that element he had in his piano was part of the two years he spent traveling with his mother in gospel music in the tent shows.

  Randy Weston

  Music, Mother, Simple

  4 Copy quote

• There's no appreciation for the giants [of jazz]; there's never been a major film on Duke Ellington , never a major film on Louis Armstrong. What they accomplished, we could never accomplish today...What's happening now is lightweight compared to what happened before. If Louis Armstrong was alive today, he'd be a superstar. If Art Tatum was alive today, my god, all the piano players would get on their knees. So that's what's missing today; we've been cut off from our heritage.

  Randy Weston

  Music, Appreciation, Art

  8 Copy quote

• I am an improviser, ... I improvise music. Whatever you want to call it all, it is all improvised music. I may capture it and go back and write it down for others, but it was originally improvised.

  Joe Zawinul

  Music, Writing, May

  53 Copy quote

• I think we've all had enough of Coltrane saxophonists. There's a case of someone ruining a generation of saxophonists, as Louis Armstrong may have ruined a generation of trumpeters.

  Paul Bley

  Thinking, Generations, May

  8 Copy quote

• If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

  Count Basie

  Play, Guy, Soul

  22 Copy quote

• I'll always remember when I first heard Lester [Young]. I'd never heard anyone like him before. He was a stylist with a different sound. A sound I'd never heard before or since. To be honest with you, I didn't much like it at first.

  Count Basie

  Sound, Different, Stylist

  9 Copy quote

• People said I'd never make 35, then I'd never make 40, 45; now I'm almost 50, so Im beginning to think maybe they might be wrong.

  Chet Baker

  Thinking, People, Might

  62 Copy quote

• The drummer; he inspired me to play like no one else I have ever met.

  Chet Baker

  Play, Inspired, Drummer

  66 Copy quote

• His musical inspiration operates in a world uncluttered by conventional bar lines, conventional chord changes, and conventional ways of blowing or fingering a saxophone. Such practical 'limitations' did not even have to be overcome in his music; they somehow never existed for him. Despite this - or more accurately, because of this - his playing has a deep inner logic. Not an obvious surface logic, it is based on subtleties of reaction, subtleties of timing and color that are, I think, quite new to jazz - at least they have never appeared in so pure and direct a form.

  Gunther Schuller

  Inspiration, Thinking, Color

  "All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century". Book by John Rockwell, 1983.

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• You know, John Coltrane has been sort of a god to me. Seems like, in a way, he didn't get the inspiration out of other musicians. He had it. When you hear a cat do a thing like that, you got to go along with him. I think I heard Coltrane before I really got close to Miles [Davis]. Miles had a tricky way of playing his horn that I didn't understand as much as I did Coltrane. I really didn't understand what Coltrane was doing, but it was so exciting the thing that he was doing.

  Wes Montgomery

  Inspiration, Cat, Thinking

  Downbeat magazine Interview, 1961.

  25 Copy quote

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• He sounded to me like he's supposed to be the savior of jazz. Sometimes people speak as though someone asked them a question. Well, no one asked him a question.

  Miles Davis

  People, Sometimes, Speak

  4 Copy quote

• 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!

  Keith Jarrett

  Tunes, Band, Knows

  4 Copy quote