Jazz Comparison Quotes

Is there one blues guy who was the most sophisticated and influential, like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong in jazz? Was it Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Lightnin' Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Robert Johnson, or all of them? I think you have to pick all of them.

Sometimes when I do a joke and it doesn't get a lot of laughs, it kind of feels like I'm doing jazz. That's kinda cool because jazz is cool, but sometimes jazz sucks ... Maybe I'm the Kenny G of comedy.

Paul Desmond sounds like a female alcoholic.

It's just music. It's trying to play clean and looking for the pretty notes. The beat in a bop band is with the music, against it, behind it. It pushes it. It helps it. Help is the big thing. It has no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug. Jazz has, and that's why bop is more flexible.

I guess certain kinds of jazz music could be Crunk. But the average jazz song, no, it's not Crunk.

Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging — but they weren't sweet.

I sounded like myself. People be saying I sound like Miles or Clifford Brown.

Not to dismiss Gershwin, but Gershwin is the chip; Ellington was the block.

Jazz is like a telescope, and a lot of other music is like a microscope.

Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.