Musicians do not have to be believed in. We do not have to be trusted. Our Music speaks for itself without the listener having to know anything about us. Music touches people's emotions in a way that nothing else can. When people find a musician they...
I put out a recording of me singing mostly jazz because I wanted people to know I'm coming from a jazz background.
Jazz, of course, is our heritage. Jazz is a culture, it's not a fad. It's up to us to see to it that it stays alive.
You know, jazz is the mother of all American music. R&B and pop and rap and everything are the branches on the main tree of the life of music, American music, which is jazz.
Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.
I don't know if I have enough guts to do a whole standard jazz record.
I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.
Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
I was a jazz major in high school, in an all-jazz band. No matter what I do, it features my musical influences.
Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.
I don't view myself as a musician anymore - I view myself as a human being that functions as a musician when I'm functioning as a musician, but that's not 24 hours a day. That's really opened me up to even more perspectives because now I look at musi...
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.
Jazz is about freedom within discipline. Usually a dictatorship like in Russia and Germany will prevent jazz from being played because it just seemed to represent freedom, democracy and the United States.
I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.
Now, the instrumentation in the jazz band and the jazz dance band has gone through many evolutions. For instance, in the 'twenties the tradition was two or three saxophones.
I fell in love with jazz when I was 12 years old from listening to Duke Ellington and hearing a lot of jazz in New York on the radio.
Who is the most worthy of admiration, musician or audience? Probably the musician will tell that his audience and the musician that his audience
Musicians don't respect a lot of the stuff that is on TRL and a lot of musicians think that stuff on the radio is not good musically so when musicians say that they like us it obviously feels good.
Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.
Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they're shy.
