Jazz Interpretation Quotes

What I believe to be jazz is constructed and improvised music which is in the air right now. But I don't think that's most people's definition of jazz, you know? We don't know what we're talking about, because we don't know the definition.

I think jazz has given me freedom with my voice.

Jazz is an endless source of ideas, because you can use anything. You can play operatic arias. You can incorporate them into jazz. You can play gypsy music and incorporate it into jazz. You can European classical and you can incorporate it into jazz. You can use anything and jazz it up, as they used to say.

My blues are so simple, but so few people can play it right

My great hero is Billie Holiday, and I've always wanted to do an album of standards with a piano-led quartet.

Don t play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast.

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.

The first time I heard a Billie Holiday record, I thought, 'What's so great about Billie Holiday?'

I don't play the traditional Charlie Parker songs. But I do improvise and I do create with my instrument, and that to me is jazz. But there are people who use the word 'jazz' only in a traditional sense, and they would be offended by that, and that's fine.

When you limit the word 'jazz' to one period of history, for the people who love that period, then maybe it can be dead because nobody plays like that anymore. But jazz is progressive music; it always has to progress, and musicians always have to find new landscapes and new ways to speak out, so of course it's always changing.

Maybe a part of me recognized how right the improvising spirit of jazz is. Not the sounds, but the freedom to work with musicians who work that way. It felt very natural to me, but I think there's a way to do it without it being a jazz record.

I'm comfortable singing jazz. The only thing I was concerned about is that everybody, even in jazz, has their own style. To me, the queen of doodling was Ella Fitzgerald, and scatting is something I never thought I could do.

One doesn't have to scat to be a jazz singer.

Jazz musicians have always taken the standards of their time and performed them with a jazz sensibility.

I've sung a whole lot of jazz. It's my favorite style of music to sing. People don't realize it, because they're so accustomed to hearing me sing musical theater.

As I became an adult, I listened to a lot of jazz, to the ladies of jazz, Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae and Nina Simone. I loved that they each covered the same songs and interpreted them totally differently. I thought that was so cool. They could each paint their own picture of that moment.

Dianne Reeves, a famous jazz singer, would be my biggest influence.

When I heard Billie Holiday's voice, Nina Simone's and Ella Fitzgerald's - there was something about their voices to me that was such a different texture than what I was used to listening to at the time. Hearing those jazz voices were so different, and I think I just gravitated toward it.

I love Monk's song, 'Just a Gigolo.' It's probably a minor song for him, but whenever I hear a recording of him playing it, I'm mesmerized because Monk clearly loved pop music. He took it very seriously and made an amazing thing out of it.

There is a modern take on certain things you can do that, to me, is still jazz.

When you're playing jazz, you have to somehow overcome that feeling of being intimidated because your aim is to portray that freedom in what you're playing.

Why can't jazz musicians just leave a melody alone?

I'm not Bill Evans. I'm not Keith Jarrett. I'm basically a singer who plays along with his voice.

I'm always looking for ways to develop as an artist, especially as a jazz artist-to find different ways of testing my voice.

In some ways Lester Young is the most complex rhythmically of any musician. He does some things which are just phenomenal.