Ray Brown Quotes

Jazz is something that you have to feel. It's something that you have to live.

What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.

Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

Music's something you feel. You have to feel it first before you hear it.

When I was younger, I'd go to the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and watch this beautiful clip of Billie Holiday playing with a bassist, a pianist and Gerry Mulligan, who was a friend of mine, on baritone sax. At one point, she looks over at Gerry, and they just smile. When those moments happen, it's just lovely.

Jazz musicians are the coolest people on the planet. Can I have some cool?

Jazz is a good barometer of freedom.

Jazz is played from the heart. You can even live by it. Always love it.

In fact, jazz has such a great feeling and great emotional content that it really doesn't require you to have technical understanding of it. I think you just have to allow your feelings to go with the music and you will find yourself carried along by it fairly quickly.

I close my eyes when I sing so I can feel the song better.

Music is an emotion, and I put it out there.

I go for as much feeling as I can rather than show what I can do up and down the neck. I don't play to show people ability.

Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.

I love jazz music and sad music. I'm a sentimental guy. I'm a romantic guy.

Music is for every single person that walks the planet.

I cannot say what I think is right about music. I only know the rightness of it.

I love Slipknot. But then I like Jao Gilberto... It's the spirit that comes through in music.

Performing is a profound experience, at least for me. It's not as if I sit down and play 'Fire and Rain' by myself, just to hear it again. But to offer it up... the energy that it somehow summons live takes me right back, and I do get a reconnection to the emotions.

Applause should be an emotional response to the music, rather than a regulated social duty.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.

I just love music, and I love what music does for people.

I like the music that I sing, cos I, like, feel it more.