Top Jazz Quotes Collection

Discover a curated collection of Jazz quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category.

Music is what you notice when it's no longer in your presence.
- Pat Metheny
Collection: Jazz

There's more bad music in jazz than any other form. Maybe that's because the audience doesn't really know what's happening.
- Pat Metheny
Collection: Jazz

Everything I do is Mingus.
- Charles Mingus
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is the language of the emotions.
- Charles Mingus
Collection: Jazz

You've got to learn your instrument.
- Charlie Parker
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is not background music.
- Horace Silver
Collection: Jazz

You never get it figured out. You just keep playing.
- David Sanborn
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is an octopus. It will take whatever it can use and it will work with it.
- Dexter Gordon
Collection: Jazz

Jazz to me is a living music.
- Dexter Gordon
Collection: Jazz

Ted Lewis could make the clarinet talk. What it said was put me back in the case!
- Eddie Condon
Collection: Jazz

Krupa's drums went through us like a triple bourbon.
- Eddie Condon
Collection: Jazz

I'm going to be on the road for the rest of my life.
- Woody Herman
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is something you have to feel, something you have to live.
- Ray Brown
Collection: Jazz

Jazz never ends... it just continues.
- Sonny Rollins
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is restless. It won't stay put & it never will.
- J. J. Johnson
Collection: Jazz

To me, jazz is a place where anything is possible.
- Bill Frisell
Collection: Jazz

Charlie Parker lifted jazz music off the dance floor and into the stratosphere!
- Joe Lovano
Collection: Jazz

Jazz isn't what you do; it's how you do it.
- Fats Waller
Collection: Jazz

One never knows, do one?
- Fats Waller
Collection: Jazz

So easy, when you know how.
- Fats Waller
Collection: Jazz

There’s no such thing as a wrong note.
- Art Tatum
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.
- John Coltrane
Collection: Jazz

Jazz has endured because it doesn't have a beginning or an ending. It's a moment.
- Robert Altman
Collection: Jazz

I wasn't so interested in being paid. I wanted to be heard. That's why I'm broke.
- Ornette Coleman
Collection: Jazz

Jazz, like leadership, combines the unpredictability of the future with the gifts of individuals.
- Max De Pree
Collection: Jazz

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

Jazz will be the classical music of the future.
- Dizzy Gillespie
Collection: Jazz

Unlike anything heard before. This is jazz for the 21st century.
- Scott Yanow
Collection: Jazz

To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!
- Louis Armstrong
Collection: Jazz

Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.
- Edgar Meyer
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is one of the few things you can do in society and express yourself freely and creatively.
- Mulgrew Miller
Collection: Jazz

Let me whisper it. Let me sigh it. Let me sing it, my dear or I will cry it.
- Shirley Horn
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is a music that is open enough to borrow from any other form of music, and has the strength to influence any other form of music.
- Herbie Hancock
Collection: Jazz

A friend told me he'd risen above jazz. I leave him there.
- Michael S. Harper
Collection: Jazz

I love to hear the note sing.
- Joe Sample
Collection: Jazz

You know the rules. No jazz before a rumble.
- S. E. Hinton
Collection: Jazz

Being grown up is boring. Besides, I don't get jazz.
- Patrick Star
Collection: Jazz

Jazz is like the universe: it's been expanding since its creation and it's connected to everything.
- Jonathan Batiste
Collection: Jazz

Of course, right away I got more interested in the far-out jazz than the traditional jazz, so I quickly was turned onto the John Zorn scene and all the wild stuff coming out of New York and Europe. Improvising is a pretty natural thing for me.
- Jherek Bischoff
Collection: Jazz

And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.
- Wynton Marsalis
Collection: Jazz

Louis Armstrong is jazz. He represents what the music is all about.
- Wynton Marsalis
Collection: Jazz

[David] Bowie went on to make best-selling music - funk, dance music, electronic music, while also being influenced by cabaret and jazz.
- David Bowie
Collection: Jazz