These jazz music quotes will inspire you. Jazz, musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging jazz music quotes, jazz music sayings, and jazz music proverbs.
Famous Jazz Music Quotes
- “What I came back to is that jazz is a music to be played and not to be intellectualized on.” ~ Gerry Mulligan
- “Jazz music just resonates with the frequency of me.” ~ Esperanza Spalding
- “Jazz music is the power of now.” ~ Wynton Marsalis
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“Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.” ~ Art Blakey
- “I don’t have a definition of Jazz. You’re just supposed to know it when you hear it.” ~ Thelonious Monk
- “Life is a lot like jazz. It’s best when you improvise.” ~ George Gershwin
- “I may be prejudiced, but I believe that jazz music has the strongest healing potential, and it’s not just because I play it and love it so much. I feel that it’s the improvisation in jazz that makes it so strong as a healing tool, what each individual gives to a tune from their heart and their soul when they take a solo. It’s all spontaneous, and it’s all love, and from the heart.” ~ Horace Silver
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“Jazz is the language of the emotions.” ~ Charles Mingus
- “Jazz to me is a living music. It’s a music that since its beginning has expressed the feelings, the dreams, hopes, of the people.” ~ Dexter Gordon
- “The spirit of jazz is the spirit of openness.” ~ Herbie Hancock
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“Jazz will endure just as long people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.” ~ John Philip Sousa
- “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” ~ Miles Davis
- “Jazz is not background music. You must concentrate upon it in order to get the most of it. You must absorb most of it. The harmonies within the music can relax, soothe, relax, and uplift the mind when you concentrate upon and absorb it. Jazz music stimulates the minds and uplifts the souls of those who play it was well as of those who listen to immerse themselves in it. As the mind is stimulated and the soul uplifted, this is eventually reflected in the body.” ~ Horace Silver
- “It takes an intelligent ear to listen to Jazz.” ~ Art Blakey
- “Jazz is freedom. You think about that.” ~ Thelonious Monk
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“You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.” ~ Charlie Parker
- “Jazz is one of the least learnable art forms.” ~ Keith Jarrett
- “Jazz music is the power of now. There is no script. It’s conversation. The emotion is given to you by musicians as they make split-second decisions to fulfill what they feel the moment requires.” ~ Wynton Marsalis
- “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” ~ Miles Davis
- “If I am playing any music at all it is jazz music.” ~ Ginger Baker
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“Jazz is the folk music of the machine age.” ~ Paul Whiteman
- “Growing up, I was very much interested in jazz music.” ~ Jan Hammer
- “I love jazz music and sad music.” ~ Fred Durst
- “Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.” ~ Francoise Sagan
- “Jazz music is to be played sweet, soft, plenty rhythm.” ~ Jelly Roll Morton
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“Playing ‘bop’ is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.” ~ Duke Ellington
- “Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.” ~ Frank Zappa
- “I tried practicing for a few weeks and ended up playing too fast.” ~ Paul Desmond
- “Make no mistake, this music is for everyone. Jazz is not an exclusive, elite club. Go ahead, listen to your Snoop Doggy Dog, Pearl Jam, Garth Brooks, but add a little Ellington, Basie, and Coltrane to your life as well.” ~ Christian McBride
- “Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.” ~ Maynard Ferguson
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“I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.” ~ Duke Ellington
- “Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.” ~ Ornette Coleman
- “People sometimes forget that jazz was built not only in the minds of the great ones but on the backs of the ordinary ones — ordinary musicians.” ~ Cab Calloway
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“I’m all in favor of getting grants for musicians. Or any other good brand of Scotch.” ~ Pepper Adams
- “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, the critics know it. And if I don’t practice for three days, the public knows it.” ~ Louis Armstrong
- “Blues and soul and jazz music have so much pain, so much beauty of raw emotion and passion.” ~ Christina Aguilera
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“Just because I’m playing jazz I don’t forget about me. I play or write me, the way I feel, through jazz, or whatever.” ~ Charles Mingus
- “To jazz, or not to jazz, there is no question!” ~ Louis Armstrong
- “Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.” ~ Jelly Roll Morton
- “Jazz music is America’s past and its potential, summed up and sanctified and accessible to anybody who learns to listen to, feel, and understand it. The music can connect us to our earlier selves and to our better selves to come. It can remind us of where we fit on the timeline of human achievement, an ultimate value of art.” ~ Wynton Marsalis
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“You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!” ~ Art Tatum
- “Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.” ~ Paul Whiteman
- “By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.” ~ Duke Ellington
- “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.” ~ Charlie Parker
- “Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom.” ~ Charlie Parker
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“The thing to judge in any jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas.” ~ Miles Davis
- “Man, there’s no boundary line to art!” ~ Charlie Parker
- “I find Indian music very funky. I mean it’s very soulful, with their own kind of blues. But it’s the only other school on the planet that develops improvisation to the high degree that you find in jazz music. So we have a lot of common ground.” ~ John McLaughlin
- “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” ~ Louis Armstrong
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“They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” ~ Charlie Parker
- “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.” ~ Duke Ellington
- “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.” ~ Nina Simone
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“All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.” ~ John Coltrane
- “Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.” ~ Art Blakey
- “Never play anything the same way twice.” ~ Louis Armstrong
- “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” ~ Aldous Huxley
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“…to me if it’s anything, jazz is a verb-it’s more like a process than it is a thing.” ~ Pat Metheny”Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” ~ Miles Davis
- “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” ~ Miles Davis
- “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” ~ Steve Martin
- “There are four qualities essential to a great jazzman. they are taste, courage, individuality, and irreverence.” ~ Stan Getz
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“There’s no such thing as a wrong note.” ~ Art Tatum
- “There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.” ~ Duke Ellington
- “It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.” ~ Johann Sebastian Bach
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“The whole thing of being in music is not to control it but to be swept away by it.” ~ Bobby Hutcherson
- “The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it’s still a melody.” ~ Stan Getz
- “Starting in the middle of a musical sentence and moving in both directions at once.” ~ John Coltrane
Jazz music is developed in part from ragtime and blues and is often characterized by synchronized rhythms, polyphonic group playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of tone, and the use of original timbres.
