Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it.
I've often cringed when I heard myself described as a jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a jazz vocalist.
A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges.
I find as much inspiration from the forerunners of jazz as I do the modern-day innovators of jazz.
At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.
Well, being a jazz musician is not a rose garden!
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.
Comedians talk to other comedians the way jazz musicians can talk to each other.
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.
Musicians like to converse. There's always interesting conversation with musicians - with classical musicians, with jazz musicians, musicians in general.
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.
Coltrane would do what you'd get a Roland Pro Tools module to do but with a group of jazz musicians.
I have a fondness for jazz, particularly for jazz singers, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald all the way through the Sinatra era.
