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. – Sonny Rollins
I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I’m a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary. – Tom Waits
One of my songs was on a jazz station for awhile. It was a song that I wrote for a jazz sax player friend of mine, and I sang and played the guitar on it. – Trevor Donovan
A lot of EDM is not bad at all when it’s simple, but a lot of it is not really musical. That’s just what I really like to do: taking what I had at the beginning, which is classical and jazz influences, and putting it into electro. – Zedd
Many jazz artists go to L.A. seeking a more comfortable life and then they really stop playing. – Sonny Rollins
I always hated jazz guitar. I loved jazz saxophone but I hated jazz guitar. If I would buy an organ trio record I would make sure I’d buy one that did not have a guitar player on it. The sound was awful! – Tom Verlaine
Where I grew up, Bob Wills and his western swing was very popular. And western swing is not that far from jazz and blues. – Willie Nelson
As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction. – Stan Getz
I’ve played with all of the heavyweights in the modern jazz, progressive jazz movement. I’ve been fortunate enough to play with them, a who’s who. All of those guys, I’ve been fortunate enough to have performed with. – Sonny Rollins
Comedy is the ultimate truth. Jazz is hitting the notes that that no one else would hit, and comedy is saying words that no one else would say. – Tommy Chong
I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz. – Terry Teachout
With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music – you can’t do that in jazz. You can’t do that with classical. – Serj Tankian
The blues. It runs through all American music. Somebody bending the note. The other is the two-beat groove. It’s in New Orleans music, it’s in jazz, it’s in country music, it’s in gospel. – Wynton Marsalis
As a jazz musician, you have individual power to create the sound. You also have a responsibility to function in the context of other people who have that power also. – Wynton Marsalis
My years of ballet and jazz dance lessons didn’t make me any more graceful – they just helped keep me from bumping into the furniture on stage. – Toni Tennille
There’s the tradition in jazz of having the Battle of the Bands, and you do not want to get your head cut when you’re playing. – Wynton Marsalis
What happens when an art form becomes ambiguous, I think, is that the standards are lowered. You can say anything is jazz. So I think it’s important to reflect on what made jazz so special. – Stefon Harris
I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences. – Wyclef Jean
I listen to a mixture of old jazz, contemporary, pop, some world beat stuff and various odds and ends. – Walter Becker
I’m a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you’d tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me. – Travis Barker
I’ve got my own studio, and I’ve got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I’ve got stuff that’s electronic, orchestral, jazz, I’ve got rock, I’ve got metal, you know, I don’t have polka. – Serj Tankian
I loved Art Tatum! And, through him, and other different jazz musicians, I actually found my technique. – Tony Bennett
Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it’s our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are. – Wynton Marsalis