Dianne Reeves Quotes

My father is a jazz musician, so I grew up hearing jazz. My parents loved it, but I didn't like it. It went on for too long. Yes, I had certain teachers that really inspired me, like Danny Barker, and John Longo. And I had no idea that I would have any impact on jazz.

I think 'Horace Silver' was actually the first live jazz group I ever heard back when I was a kid in St. Louis. So along with most players of my generation, I have a real affection for the music of 'Horace Silver.'

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

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

Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves more than anyone listening to them does.

The history of jazz for the last 45 years has come through the Monterey Jazz Festival stages. I think there's developed a legacy and an aura around the festival.

If you don't already know about jazz music, how would you be exposed? How would get an opportunity to find out if it spoke to you? If you get exposed to it enough, you might find a taste for it.

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

I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people.

I missed jazz, kind of. And by the time I came to it in life, it was too intimidating to enjoy thoroughly.

So much of what I create has been due to the influence of Miles Davis and Donald Byrd, and so many of those that have passed on. Their music, their legacy lives on with the rest of us because we are so highly influenced by their experience and what they have given us.

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

I was really trying to sell to people who hate jazz: to make a case for the art form as youthful and energetic, not the sort of rarified intellectual activity it's painted as.

Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

I've met a lot of jazz musicians in my day, and they're all funny.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.

I never studied jazz technically; I just know and love the music.

The month of September is Women in Jazz, so I'm doing jazz there in September. I'm in for the duration.

I think that one of the problems that jazz has is that it's so incestuous that it's starting to kill itself.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

I don't think that jazz, as any kind of an art form, has any permanence attached to it, apart from the practitioners of it.

I would not describe myself as an avid jazz fan and I am not a jazz musician myself. However, that is not to say that jazz does not play a vital and important role in my life.

There are singers that I have enjoyed, from Nina Simone and Ray Charles onward. But the music that made music the number one thing for me as a youth was jazz.