Jazz Ensemble Quotes

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

Jazz music creates so many phenomenal figures.

Jazz is a beautiful word. I love it.

I saw Al Foster with Miles Davis the other week. It was beautiful. But, the whole thing was, Al Foster played as well as everybody else, but all of them were quite brilliant under Miles Davis' direction.

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

I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.

Who knows ... we'll be playing Jazz and having a good time!

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

The people at Jazz at Lincoln Center are an amazing group and have done a phenomenal job teaching kids and audiences of all ages about jazz.

I mean, in the course of an evening, people will take a solo here and there, but generally it's all about the rhythm of that music. Dealing with the rhythm with everything. That's essentially at least my concept of what that group is.

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

To me, Bill's musical heart is in Earthworks, in the jazz they are playing, in the acoustic kit.

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

For me, great jazz records really feel like everyone in the room is playing together in a zone - and all the musicians are completely in sync with each other.

Even though the music I make gathers influences from all over the place, I feel that the core of what I do comes from the jazz tradition. In terms of improvisation, interaction, feel and overall concept, Jazz is my main source of information and inspiration.

I've been invited to do a trio with a fantastic jazz guitarist and a harmonica player.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

No. Maceo played sax, didn't he, well they used to sit in.

I already experimented with free jazz in the 1960s and, in my opinion, to play free jazz, you have to be a perfect musician and a perfect human being - and none of us are!

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

If you're playing with a number of people, there are all sorts of textures, all kinds of possibilities you can get into. So why just play a theme together and then take solos?

I wanted to keep pushing the musical ideas I had about jazz, music from Africa and the Caribbean.

Me and the Dap-Kings, the whole band is playing a wedding band in 'The Wolf of Wall Street.'

If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it's a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.

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.'