«Jazz»

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

Barbara Januszkiewicz

Jazz is a very accurate, curiously accurate accompaniment to 20th century America.

Ken Burns

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.

Lou Reed

Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.

Barbara Januszkiewicz

Jazz is about being in the moment.

Herbie Hancock

Jazz is an open ended music designed for open minds.

Author unknown

One thing I like about jazz is that it emphasized doing things differently from what other people were doing.

Herbie Hancock

Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.

Paul Whiteman

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

Louis Armstrong

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

Billy Crystal

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.

Wynton Marsalis

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it’s our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

Wynton Marsalis

Jazz is smooth and cool. Jazz is rage. Jazz flows like water. Jazz never seems to begin or end. Jazz isn’t methodical, but jazz isn’t messy either. Jazz is a conversation, a give and take. Jazz is the connection and communication between musicians. Jazz is abandon.

Nat Wolff

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

Vera Nazarian

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

Kurt Vonnegut

I would say that jazz is my own language.

Amy Winehouse

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

Stan Getz

One of the things I like about Jazz, kid, is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?

Bix Beiderbecke

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

(Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry)

Aberjhani

Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it’s not a fad. It’s up to us to see to it that it stays alive.

Marla Gibbs

Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

Christian Scott

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

Henri Matisse

Risk is at the heart of jazz. Every note we play is a risk.

Steve Lacy

As long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be some jazz.

Lee Konitz

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

Yo-Yo Ma

You not only have to know your own instrument, you must know the others and how to back them up at all times. That’s jazz.

Oscar Peterson

That’s the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn’t make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.

Dave Brubeck

The beauty of jazz is that it’s malleable. People are addressing it to suit their own personalities.

Pat Metheny

The essentials of Jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing & instrumental personality.

Mose Allison

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

Ornette Coleman

It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.

Herbie Hancock

I never heard of a Jazz musician who retired. You love what you do, so what are you going to do... play for the walls?

Nat Adderley

In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.

David Amram

Some people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they’re trying to say with jazz. You don’t need any prologues, you just play.

Oscar Peterson