Jeffrey Osborne Quotes

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

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

I have a big love for jazz music. The only thing I hated about singing with a jazz band was having to wear a gown to everything.

My favorite music is jazz, actually. It's what I listen to, it's what I was raised on, and it's what I prefer to sing.

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

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

I think I was supposed to play jazz.

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.

As a kid, I used to go see all the jazz players, Oscar Peterson, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespe.

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.

Jazz doesn't have much to do with how I write songs, but I am a big fan. My favorites are Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal, and Mose Allison.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or quartet.

Hamp would ask me about tempos in the band: 'Jacquet,' he'd say, 'knock off that tempo.' A lot of jazz musicians didn't prefer to play for dancers, which was their loss, really. But good jazz has always had that dance feel.

Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones.

I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.

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

I'm not a big jazz fan.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

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

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.

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

I think everybody has to kind of decide what the word 'jazz' means to them, and that's fine.

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