Kurt Elling Quotes

I always tell people that, just to be a bad jazz musician, you have to be better than most musicians. The worst jazz musicians are normally better than most musicians, because you have to know so much.

I'm a jazz musician, and I really wanted to not miss an opportunity to have the full connection to jazz.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

I cut myself off from the mainstream of jazz. It stood me in good stead later on, as a musician.

I don't worry too much about the fundamentalist principles that are in almost any discussion about jazz.

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.

Bill Evans is a real serious jazz pianist who, in my book, crossed over boundaries in terms of color. He used the piano as his canvas.

There is an awful lot of what I call recreational jazz going on, where people go out and learn a particular language or style and become real sharks on somebody else's language.

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

I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.

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.

By its very nature, no one person can ever be the center of jazz.

I just don't know anything about jazz, really. I've never really listened to it, but I'd definitely like to discover more about it.

Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.

I don't want to do free jazz! Because free jazz - which is the musical equivalent of free marketeering - isn't actually free at all. It's just constrained by what your muscles can do.

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

I think jazz is actually quite unforgiving in its disdain for nostalgia. It demands creativity and change at its highest level.

Kenny G is not real jazz. I don't even think Wynton Marsalis is real jazz. I don't think Harry Connick Jr. is real jazz. If there is such a thing as real jazz, The Lounge Lizards is real jazz, Henry Threadgill is real jazz, Bill Frisell is real jazz, you know?

People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.

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

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

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

What I'm doing, I prefer to call that jazz, because it is a beautiful word - I love it.

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

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