Stevie Ray Vaughan Quotes

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

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

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 got into trad jazz, then modern jazz, then avant-garde jazz, between the ages of 16 to 18.

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

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.

This is what really makes real jazz musicians: people coming out with their own voice.

I started out trying to play more straight-ahead jazz. I went to Berklee in the early '60s when it was a brand new school, and so there was no fusion music. There wasn't a lot of mixing together of different kinds of music at that time, so jazz was kind of pure jazz.

The starting point of all great jazz has got to be format, a language that you can work within that, in some ways, is much tighter than the blues or even gospel. It's all working towards the same destination - the difference being that Miles Davis flew there, and I'm still taking the subway.

I always leaned toward free jazz... experimental jazz and progressive jazz. I feel like jazz is just part of the flavor and palette that you have as a musician to experiment with.

People think jazz music is all standards and the Great American Songbook. But it's really about the sensibility, the feel you bring to the music.

I'm thrilled when I hear the greatest jazz musicians. They continue to search in ways other musicians do not.

If one takes all the styles in jazz harmonically from the earliest beginnings to the latest experiments, he still has a rather limited scope when compared to the rest of music in the world.

I started in New Orleans music and played all through the history of jazz.

I think that people should learn about that. In most music, there's one way that you do something, and that's the only way. In jazz, it's a lot different.

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.

The point of jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

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.

As far as I'm concerned, the essentials of jazz are: melodic improvisation, melodic invention, swing, and instrumental personality.

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 understood jazz, I understood how it worked. That's what I apply to everything.

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.

There's a steady forward march of a creative process that some of us stay with and don't give up - that should be an admirable thing - from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker to Miles to Ornette and some people who are not even known today - some kids coming up - people who are out to change the world.

I don't know any jazz stuff. I don't know how to jam in that way. So jamming, for me, is writing a tune.