George Benson Quotes

I'm a great jazz fan.

I grew up around jazz. I love jazz.

The day of the great jazz improviser who doesn't know how to read music is over.

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.

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

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 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.

It's funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don't learn jazz in school.

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

One of the things that I loved about listening to Miles Davis is that Miles always had an instinct for which musicians were great for what situations. He could always pick a band, and that was the thing that separated him from everybody else.

Coltrane came to New Orleans one day and he was talking about the jazz scene. And Coltrane mentions that the problem with jazz was that there were too few groups.

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

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

I was totally into jazz in my teens.

My dad is a big jazz fan, and that was the reason I first got into jazz.

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

I think as long as people are around and can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz.

I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.

I haven't a great jazz band, and I don't want one.

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

I have a secret love 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.

So I went into jazz and performed in jazz clubs all over the country.