All the classic jazz players all sang and a lot of ’em sang blues.

The rest of y’all are lost because you don’t have a personal relationship with God—our God.” But art engages you in the world, not just the world around you but the big world, and not...

Now listen for your song. Everybody’s got a song. When I used to chase the Trane— John Coltrane that is— he used to tell me, ‘If I know a man’s sound, I know the man.’...

Some people think I’m a rock ‘n’ roll musician and some think I’m a jazz musician but, for me, there is no difference.

I love good rock’n’roll, blues and jazz, gospel, and a little reggae.

One thing about playing the real jazz is that you can’t count it.

I couldn’t get my album played over the so-called smooth jazz stations. Jazz stations would not play it. You don’t always know who you’re making that soul connection with.

Kelsey plays the piano, and he’s also a tremendous singer. I’m classically trained, and he’s more of a jazz improvisatory pianist. So, we don’t usually sit down and play together.

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their rightmind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.People would much rather say, ‘Get in my...

Jazz changes and all. But I don’t know the names of what it is I’m doing.

I’m this strange kind of fusion of jazz, pop, and R&B.

emotion recollected in tranquility.” . . .As he played, his mind’s eye became the fisher’s bobber, guided by a line of sound around the driftwood of thought, the residue of his life, which materialized from...

There was no control except the “mood of his power… and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play someplace where the weather for instance could change the next series...

Jazz is not just ‘Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.’ It’s a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.

You hear lots of notes, don’t you? Some have a major sound. Some have a minor sound. But there’s not one blue note among all these black and white keys. The real blues, the soul...

Well, actually, I don’t consider myself a jazz legend or anything.

It was the first 36 (in all-around) for Jazz. She had a really good meet.

It’s got strong roots. I don’t know if we’ve quite established ourselves in the Jazz mold yet, but we’re hopeful.

If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

If I’m going to be a jazz player, I need to understand Miles Davis.

Do you?

On the radio I listen to the easy-listening stations, the jazz stations.

I don’t know how much more what I’ve done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There’ve been lots of people who brought...

They call it music, but it’s just this side of magic.

But his own mind was helpless against every moment’s headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facets so eventually he was completely governed by...

it ain’t as hard as picking cotton

It is rare that even a jazz musician finds an individual voice.

I was a weird kid. I should’ve been gay because I listened to a lot of Broadway musicals. I don’t know why I’m not gay. I listen to a lot of jazz and world music,...

I’m really glad today for Karl Malone. But (the current Jazz players) weren’t involved in (the celebration) that much. They weren’t out there on the street (during the statue unveiling).

What is my definition of jazz? ‘Safe sex of the highest order.

Jazz in New Orleans – that’s what the world loves.

…I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject...

Did Bach ever eatpancakes at midnight?

Jazz and vodka, the fuel of resistance.

My God, what a sensation to be an atom in the scheme of such grandiosity. The allurement, the jazz, and the physics of it all . . .

I ran a few miles, Davis, and they were musical. Then I made love like the sound of a trumpet, as heard by Helen Keller.

bohemian Paris,” where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on flying in the...

Today you go into make a modern recording with all this technology. The bass plays first, then the drums come in later, then they track the trumpet and the singer comes in and they ship...

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

My CD collection has a lot of world music – lots of Indian, African, Portuguese, Greek, Italian music. Because of my husband, a lot of jazz, too.

All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city’s monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.

And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost...

There’s a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

I’m very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you?...

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

The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.

People say we’re a jazz group. But there’s no way I would ever call myself a jazz drummer. The only thing that’s jazz about us is keeping the need to move forward and evolve.

I had a dream last night I was awake through the pregnancy but I fell asleep at birth when I awoke I was Pinocchio and stuck inside a tree, does that mean I don’t have...

Diana Krall knocks me out. I like jazz and I like her simple approach.

The thing in jazz that will get Bix Beiderbecke out of his bed at two o’clock in the morning, pick that cornet up and practice into the pillow for another two or three hours, or...