Timothy B. Schmit Quotes

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

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.

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

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

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

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there.

I'm not a big jazz fan.

I have tons of jazz records: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis. I could go on and on.

I listen to jazz mainly. Mainstream jazz.

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

Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.

After I exhausted the blues thing, I got into jazz.

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?

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

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

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.

At 14 and 15, I used to listen to Tito Puente, Dave Valentine and everything that was happening with American jazz. I love it.

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.

I loved Art Tatum! And, through him, and other different jazz musicians, I actually found my technique.

I listened to classical music. I listened to jazz. I listened to everything. And I started becoming interested in the sounds of jazz. And I went to a concert of Jazz at the Philharmonic when we lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I saw Charlie Parker play and Billie Holiday sing and Lester Young play, and that did it. I said, 'That's what I want to do.'

I was trained in jazz, which I love.

Thelonious Monk was one of the musicians I most connected with early on. I'm a huge Betty Carter fan, and the way that Abbey Lincoln and Shirley Horn grew immensely from the time they were young is so inspirational.

Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.

When I started music, I started out in Puerto Rico with classical music. But what really made me want to be a musician was jazz, and because I didn't grow up with jazz, I had to learn it from a very basic level. I had to go into the history and learn everything about the development of the music, all the players and all that stuff.