Illinois Jacquet Quotes

I skipped school one day to see Dizzy Gillespie, and that's where I met Coltrane. Coltrane and Jimmy Heath just joined the band, and I brought my trumpet, and he was sitting at the piano downstairs waiting to join Dizzy's band. He had his saxophone across his lap, and he looked at me and he said, 'You want to play?'

I always wanted to sing a jazz record.

I want to stay with the Jazz.

I've sung a whole lot of jazz. It's my favorite style of music to sing. People don't realize it, because they're so accustomed to hearing me sing musical theater.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

I recorded my first jazz record in the '70s.

So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it.

I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.

And I played in jazz band as well during all three years in school.

I think you have to have a jazz pedigree to be on jazz radio.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

Jazz is a music of great achievements but speed and chops serve a different function in jazz.

I was blessed to work with The Jazz Messengers when the two piano players were Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

Sometimes you need to stand with your nose to the window and have a good look at jazz. And I've done that on many occasions.

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

I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that.

I've always wanted to record a jazz record. I did one in the '70s with Barbara Carroll. It's been a journey.

They always want to sell me as a hard bopper.

I haven't a great jazz band, and I don't want one.

I don't want to sound as if I'm doing something tremendously special. But I am a jazz fan.

If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.

As for my band, well, my mentors were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Jimmie Lunceford, and no one had a band more smartly dressed than Duke.

I would love to make a real jazz album someday because I never have. But that's something I'm not in a rush to do.

In some ways, jazz is the most precise of art forms and the loosest in the sense that it's all about improvisation, but the musicianship required is kind of insane. To actually play with real jazz musicians is a different level of musicianship that almost has no equal in any other form of music in the world.

I'm a trumpet player, and I sing jazz.